Dorothy and Jason were married on the 21st of June in Fairbanks. It was a lovely wedding. The skies were sunny with just a few clouds, the temperatures warm (for us), and a light breeze kept the bugs away. There were a couple of snags, like the music not being loud enough for anybody to hear, but nobody seemed to mind (or even notice) what might not have gone according to plan. It seems that with weddings, the only thing people are really interested in is seeing the bride and groom successfully wedded. The food was good too.
We didn't see much of the young couple during our visit. Dorothy apologized at one point for not having much time for visiting, but I [Michael] told her apologies weren't necessary: Dorothy did most of the planning and a good deal of the preparation for her big day, and I knew that this was not the trip for a visit. My gratification came from seeing them together, and happy.
Our drive up to Fairbanks was uneventful, although the runup to the drive was not. Three days before our departure we decided that Sheryl's Isuzu was no longer suitable for towing (the frame is rusting away thanks to Juneau's climate), so we bought a car. The next day we got a different car after discovering the dealership misled us about the availability of a trailer hitch (and they were disinclined to deal with us on the second car until we revealed that we took the precaution of cancelling the check we wrote for the first one, and the first deal was as dead as the check). We drove up in a 2008 Mercury Mariner.
My dad joined us in Fairbanks and came along on our drive to Wasilla. In a few more days Dad and I will fly down to Juneau to tackle a couple of home renovation projects, after which he'll be flying back to Illinois and I'll come back north to retrieve Sheryl and the kids, after which we'll drive back home.
I'm taking lots of pictures, as always, which leads to the topic of my column for June. Sorry I'm late posting it, but we were on the road when it went to press.
If a picture is worth a thousand words
Click. A precious moment of my children's early life is recorded for posterity. Click, click. Two more precious moments. Click, click, click, click. Get the picture?
I inherited my photography hobby from my father. He inherited his hobby from his father, who served as the photographer for a small Illinois newspaper. Because of their passion for pictures I got to see snippets of my father's childhood, his tour with the Army in the 1950s, and my own early years a decade later.
I bought my first camera when I was 8 years old, a Kodak 104 instamatic. I also bought my first roll of film then, and when my pictures were all taken I paid to have them developed.
And then I stopped taking pictures for a few months. I had to, since there was no more money for film and developing.
Until the digital revolution, photography was a hobby with a price. Every picture cost money, good or bad, with more tending toward the bad side than the good. Worse yet, film photographers had no way to tell whether a given picture was any good until it came back from the processor, and only professionals actually exposed enough film to capture the "right" moment.
The opening years of digital photography were slow to reveal the promise of the new technology. Early digital cameras offered low-resolution images of mediocre quality, and limited memory storage meant that only a few pictures could be taken at a time.
But technology marched forward, offering better cameras and more storage for less money. In this decade, digital image quality has improved to the point of rivaling film, and on-board storage has expanded from kilobytes to gigabytes.
When I first saw my father taking dozens upon dozens of pictures with his digital camera I thought it was a novelty. When I saw the results it was a revelation. To be sure, many of the individual pictures weren't very good, but there were so many of them that the number of keepers was actually quite respectable. Additionally, the sequences themselves were fun to watch.
I adopted my father's technique. If a picture is worth a thousand words, after all, then a sequence of pictures should be worth thousands of words, right?
I did my father one better too, by changing the setting on my camera from single exposure to continuous, so that when I hold down the shutter button the camera takes a continuous stream of pictures, slightly more than one every second. I've been taking a lot of pictures.
But even good concepts can go awry. After a recent outing to the beach I came home to discover over five hundred pictures on our camera, which I added to the nearly 18,000 pictures already on the computer. More and more, I feel as if I'm trying to contain Pandora in a digital box.
I try to pare down the pictures, I really do. But the reality is that although 90 percent of my pictures may get deleted, 10 percent remain. What am I supposed to do with 50 great pictures of a day at the beach?
I'm not much better with videotape. On our last big road trip I recorded 14 hours of video footage. How many bowls of popcorn does that equate to? Surely, I do not know.
The upshot of all this is that I believe digital photography has diminished the value of a picture. The pictures on my hard drive do not represent 18 million words. Indeed, the whole collection can probably be summed up in two words: too much.
My kids are getting into the act now. We bought them cheap digital cameras at Christmas, and since then it has become a regular event for my 3-year-old boy to come to me with tears in his eyes because his camera has quit working. There's never really a problem with the camera, of course. He's simply filled the memory card again.
And so a fourth-generation photography buff has come into being. I can hear him now. Click, click, click. More pictures he wants me to look at.
I see one-terabyte hard drives in the store these days. How many words are a million pictures worth? I'll find out soon enough.
