The Digital Shoe Box

A few years ago, my father and I decided we wanted to make a book about his grandparents, William Raymond Randolph and Mary Emma Sophia Schriefer .

While not a scholarly effort to record our family lineage, it is to be a pictorial collection of their lives, family and friends. As most would do, we put the call out to our relatives for prints and negatives, and received hundreds of responses. We spent much of the Spring of 2000 scanning and documenting who was in each image; collecting around a thousand images, all coming from prints and negatives relatives had collected into photo albums or had stashed away in shoe boxes in their attics.

With the switch, for most people from film to digital cameras, it begs the question, "What will the digital shoebox in the future look like?", "How will the 'family historians' of tomorrow, 'find' the digital images of today, if there is no physical shoe box in the attic?"

While I have no real answer (sorry), I do have a mechanism that can fill a gap, that is, the creation of digital books of images, each year for family events, travel/vacation experiences, etc. While is does not answer or provide a solution for long term access to a digital image, it does provide a physical marker in time of an event, that could wind up in your attic to be found by one of your future relatives.

I've been using Blurb to create my books. They provide a nice client application that you can freely download and (while a little buggy) provides a large selection of book sizes, layout styles and templates.



Hopefully, some of these will find there way into someone's attic, to be found by a future family historian.

A Tribute

Sixteen years ago a Humane Society graduate came in to our lives and became a much loved family member. Three years ago, his hairy face provided me the inspiration for naming my photo business, Bearded Dog Studios. Two weeks ago he died of an oral tumor that came on fast and aggressive and took a large toll on his quality of life. In the end we chose to put him down because he was in pain, restless and not happy.

But like most things, his end is not the story.

Shortly after Laurie and I were married, we decided that we were ready for an addition to our family. We had one cat, 'Bud', my cat from my bachelor days, and he needed a companion, as Laurie and I both worked. So off we went to the Humane Society looking of a 'black' dog. Laurie had to have a black dog and she already had its name picked out, 'Raisin'. We saw many dogs, even one that looked liked Raisin. We took him into one of the 'Get-Acquainted' rooms, he was not much in the mood to get acquainted with us, instead he just wanted to sniff and figure out what other dogs had been in there before.
Needless to say we were rather bummed, but on our way out we stopped to take one last look at the puppy pen. Out of no where, popped up the head. A shaggy puppy head, already with a full goatee. I looked at that puppy. I looked at Laurie and said, you know, he looks just like Grover on Sesame Street. Except he wasn't blue nor did he have a red nose, but is was a pretty close resemblance.

He's the one we took home that day, a Grover not a Raisin and like I said above we spent the next 16 years together. We added a daughter, Paige, a few more cats, Lewis, Oliver and Cassie, but everyday he was there, ready in the morning to get the newspaper, ready at every meal time to sample a few bites and help do the dishes, ready each time I came home with a tail-wag greeting and ready each evening to jump on the bed, curl up and get a good nights sleep.

Grover, friend, we surely miss you, but are thankful for the time we had together and know one day we will see each other again and when we do, we'll toss that ball again.

The Human Element

It seems that sale-able stock photos typically needs to include a person or persons to have the image appeal to the business-element that are the major purchasers of stock images.

But how does one include people when you are on your own or by yourself because you were unsuccessful at dragging family, wife or kids, friends or neighbors along with you? You use the one person that is always with you -- yourself.

If you shoot your landscapes from a tripod (and you should!) all you need to do is switch on your timer, compose the image, trip the shutter, pop yourself into the frame, hold still and voila, there you have it, a beautiful landscape made stock sale-able with the addition of the "human element".

Evening Light

Driving home the other evening, the sky around Portland was aglow with that rich, warm, evening light that I'm used to seeing in the Fall. A combination of events, dark low clouds to the East, sun breaking through the clouds from the West and clear air from recent rain, all combined to create the most beautiful light I've seen in a while. So inspired by this light and, for once, actually remembering to have my camera with me, I quickly took this picture while stopped at a traffic light.

Just Starting

This site is for the discussion of all things photography, film, digital, landscape, portrait, software, Apple, tripods, cameras, computers, lens, zoom, animals, people, stock, fine art, making money, ... just to list a few items.