delete the ghosts, keep the empties
Published January 2, 2009 | 
And my traveling companions
Are ghosts and empty sockets
I’m looking at ghosts and empties
But I’ve reason to believe
We all will be received
In Graceland
– paul simon
The say that to some the sea is like a lover. Well, around here the water has pretty much turned into an Ice Queen. At least when it comes to the water, you’re free to find yourself another distraction until she decides to warm up again. Yikes!
I’m sure it doesn’t help my winter mood that I’ve decided to take these recent quiet days to try to sort through the thousands of photographs I’ve collected over the last 5 years or so.
Before the advent of digital you only took pictures that you felt pretty good about, and even then only about half were worth keeping once you dropped the money to have them developed. Now with digital, you can just click away. What’s worse is that in order to get rid of a picture you are forced to sit there with your cursor over the little trash can icon and “click” to send an image off to oblivion with no hope of getting it back. You’re left always erring on the side of caution.
The problems in self editing are many. The first that comes to mind for me is how many photos I’ve thought were total trash that someone else thought were simply “all that”. So it’s hard to trust your own judgment. Sure you can easily delete the blurry and over exposed, etc., but everything else is up to the eye of the beholder. In addition you can’t forget all those shots that are bad now, but with a little Photoshop fu*kary, can be turned into something nice. Then of course there is the old sentimentality dilemma. Many photos might suck with spurs on as far as photography goes, but they hold some personal memory within their crooked horizons. You have to keep them.
Of course you can’t go through old photos without those twinges of two dimensional romanticization of those frozen moments. You keep finding yourself staring at a picture and hearing Ray Charles singing “That Spirit of Christmas” in the background. Certainly some moments deserve the sound track, others of course are just the frozen second right before the you found out a dog wizzed on your PFD. Life always looks better in hindsight. Wen tend to gloss over the dog wiz. The trick about sorting photographs is knowing which bits of your past to delete.
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One Response to delete the ghosts, keep the empties
I have that problem too. I can’t store them on my own hard drive because it isn’t big enough!