Weekend Pictorial

pic·to·ri·al

1. Relating to, characterized by, or composed of pictures.
2. Represented as if in a picture
3. Illustrated by pictures

From Latin pictrius, for PAINTER!

Amazing to me is that I have just one more interest in my life....that of taking pictures....and that it can be verified as another type of PAINTING! Now that we have cameras and computers, there is just no end to the editorializing one can do. "When I was a girl"....my students really hate it when I start a sentence with that! But truly, when I was a girl, we did not all own cameras. My family must have had some kind of camera for those old black and whites we used to see, and I wonder how in the world mom could afford to develop them, and how in the world did we ever fill up a film? I think they came in 12, 24 and 36? If you were in a hurry to have something developed, you would definitely choose the 12 exposure. 24 and 36 were more economical, but you had to think about how you would ever take that many pictures. Pictures were such a luxury and required so much planning. Now one can take hundreds of photos and post them onto the computer in minutes.

Mom snapped pictures of us on Sunday after church, quite often it seems. We were all lined up by age in front of the cellar door. Sometimes, just for kicks, we would line up by height, and if we were being silly, by cuteness, or by intelligence. It always led to many laughs, but picture taking was really a special event. I don't have many pictures when I was a child, but more in high school. Mom probably let me borrow her camera on special occasions. I remember one camera that was a rectangle shape with a flash cube you had to attach to the top, and one had a long bar of flashes. One camera held all the pictures on a disk that you could take in to the store. There was no editing, no cropping, no color enhancing. Just take in the disk, and get them all printed and pay for them all, good or not. Later, we had the old rolls of film. Some cameras even had you pushing a lever a couple of times to advance the film. If you forgot to turn on the flash, you still had to advance it, and most likely take another to get one with a flash as the first one was probably no good. Please, please do not open the camera or all the film will be ruined. It couldn't get too much sun or get wet or it would be ruined, and again, no cropping, no enhancing....just take it to the store, get it developed and pay for the whole roll, good or not. I still have a box full of negatives, waiting for the time when I could ever possibly use them. I am not sure if any photo business would be able to retrieve any photos from those ancient negatives. I remember the 110s, the 35m., the disk, the instamatic...all not so user friendly to most friendly users.

We are so fortunate to live in the digital world with my love of taking pictures. Now, EVERYONE owns a camera, and most know how to edit and crop and enhance on their computer. If the pictures don't look good, just delete them. If you make a copy, you can mess with that, and if you don't like it, delete it, or revert back to original if you are on your computer or at one of those photo stations in the store. Crop, color, desaturate, brighten, sharpen, add text, delete...you can even print one in several different colors. No longer do we need black and white film and colored film. No longer are we at the mercy of printing the entire roll, good or not. It takes just a touch on a keyboard to change the photos you have taken.

There are so many things that give me joy! Today, share with me my love of taking pictures and my love of editing them. Thanks for sharing my weekend in pictures with me.

Children, grandchildren, volleyball, farming, digging in the dirt, taking pictures, some beautiful weather, the beauty God has placed all around us, time to look, and eyes to see! I am so very blessed!