I finished stage 1 of the photo sort today. All of my digital photos are now on a removable drive. All I need to do now is sort them in to some kind of order. Quite hard when you have complete DVDs full of photos that you cannot remember. But at least I have a rough date for them all.
I started with a film camera, probably about 40 years ago. Then about 20 years ago I picked up my first digital camera. I remember walking around London taking photographs of just about everything, including post boxes, telephone boxes and traffic lights. The quality was quite poor, but it made taking a single photograph so much cheaper. A single photo from film cost about 25p at the time (including the film cost). In 1999 I took over 2000 digital photos. Since then I have taken over 150,000 photos, something I could never have afforded with a film camera.
It is amazing how a simple piece of technology can change your life so much. Now with cameras in phones we have digital photographs everywhere. Why do we take photos? Is it to remind ourselves of events (and if it is why can’t I remember any of the photos on that DVD)? One of the things I like to do is to look through some old photographs I inherited.
This photo is over 50 years old, but still something I like to look at. So who will be interested in looking at my 150,000 photos in 50 years time? Like I said, even at one photo a second it would take a full working week just to scroll through them. Who will care, or will our photos disappear with us?
So it got me to wondering, if I could put together a photo album to pass on to the future what would it contain? If I had one photo for each year of my life what would it be? Or if I had 10 photos to cover my whole life what would I pick? So maybe another project for lockdown time – put together a photo book with a page a year from 1999 to today. But what would I choose for a cover photo of the book of my life?
I guess my photo for this year might just be a toilet roll.
And talking of toilet rolls, I have discovered the location of another stash today – they are all going on the survival map. Slowly I am dragging confessions out of the roll-rich.