Late-ish
There’s nothing like a self-imposed deadline sliding by to make yourself feel bad about yourself. Fortunately, this time, I get to blame it on my computer. My photo app has been seized for about a week now. It’s incredibly frustrating.
To make matters worse, Googling it reveals two things - this is a common problem after upgrading the system OS and the causes are so myriad that there is no one solution. Instead, I’ve been having to spend a few minutes every day trying yet another fix. So far, none have worked.
The good news is that one of my favorite graphic design apps, Pixelmator, now has a companion app designed specifically for photos called, naturally enough, Photomator. It is brilliant and I’m looking forward to using it a lot more. Especially once I get my library back.
But this highlights how much of an issue storage is in the photographic arts. It’s not just a digital-age problem, either. How to deal with negatives and slides was a problem long before digital photos were invented. But digital photography has definitely made the issue worse.
Debates rage in online forums whether to delete or archive all the shots you don’t care about. I tend to just archive and forget, on the basis that even bad shots can someday be repurposed into other art, like collage or image creation. Of course this means that I have several terabytes of archives sitting on a couple of external hard drives.
And I rely on software to keep it all organized for me. Which works, right up until it doesn’t. I’m sure that if I looked real hard, I could find a metaphor for grown-up life in there somewhere.
I’ve been thinking about going back to film. Not only would this let me up my pretentiousness by a factor of twenty, it would force me to be more deliberate in my shooting. Film is expensive. Developing it, these days, is even more so. But there is something appealing about holding a contact sheet and seeing the 24 or 36 photos and knowing there are no others. That whatever you see is what you got.
Maybe that’t the metaphor.
Hopefully, the next issue will be out somewhere closer to on-time. See you then.
My daughter used to go looking for the butter in buttercups... シ I love the idea of you using film. Rather than pretentious, maybe think brave. To be willing to risk, make mistakes, and live in the present moment throughout the process, whatever shows up.
Ooh, do you have a place to set up your own darkroom? How cool would that be?