Photo Project: Part 1 - Printed Photos

This part of my list has been on my mind since Ruby was born. I've always enjoyed taking pictures. When I was young, I took a camera everywhere and I developed every roll of film I took. In fact, if I knew you between 1994 and 2001 it's likely we had our picture taken together at least once. And I got duplicates just in case you wanted a copy too. But I never gave them to you. Trust me... I know.

The issue with printed photos has always been the storage of the photos and the meshing into albums. Albums seem so permanent. Scrapbooks are even worse. What if I want to frame this some day.......... Digital cameras made this much simpler in some ways - the storage and sorting is in hard-drive land and I don't have to worry about it. But since I haven't had a picture printed since around 2004 that will be a different post. These printed photos have lived in a box for too long, so tonight, with fear and trepidation, and with the help of Blue's Clues (I couldn't wait until AFTER she was in bed?) I began sorting, scrapping, categorizing, and albuming the printed photos of the last 20 years of my life (yes, really).

(This doesn't even TOUCH it...)

Because it is the most distant but still fresh period of my life, and because there are more pictures from this period than any other, I decided to start with high school and work my way into college and post-college/pre-Justin. High school was high school, with random candids, events, and self-portraits. College was mostly my best friend, Jenny, and Opera Workshop (we did The Mikado my freshman year... I loved the makeup). Post-college/pre-Justin was a short period of time where I lived A LOT and took a lot of pictures, mostly of friends, mostly not to be featured in the album. Those are the breaks. I do have some pictures of bands I played with, some weddings, and my two solo overseas trips.

(please pay no attention to the bedroom/unmade bed in background)

I tried to stay loosely chronological, but there were a couple of situations (like the bi-annual Confederate Heritage Ball... ahem.) where I allowed all photos in that category to stay together. Made more sense that way.

Did anyone else ever have a Panoramic feature of their camera? I can think of two shots ever where I was glad that that option was available to me. But in my pile-o-pictures there were an unimaginable number of unnecessary panoramic size pictures. Apparently, the switch just stayed on "panoramic" from 1998 to the Fall of 2000. These shots were not of beach sunsets, waterfalls, or whatever else one would use the panoramic vision for, but just regular shots, with the subject matter in the center and a sea of what-the-heck surrounding. So I cut them. I did it. And I'm glad I did, because otherwise they wouldn't have fit in my album.

Also, please don't tell my mom, but in the process there were pictures, nay, whole Wal-mart Photo Envelopes full of pictures that didn't mean squat to anybody anywhere ever. I mean pictures of my mom sitting by a La Quinta Inn pool in a t-shirt and shorts, obviously not having a good time. Or the one of my oldest sister with no make-up yelling at her kid in the mall. Someone (probably me) took those pictures to be funny, but I can promise you, friend... they're not. So guess what. They're getting thrown away. And there may be some that aren't even wretched that get thrown away, and it's alright if that happens. I'm telling myself that.

So that's the first installment. There are some pictures from childhood/Jr high that I'm really not sure what to do with. There are also a lot of pictures of people's kids, or friends' school pictures that I really don't know where they should go either. Wallet sized photos of my nieces and nephews in pre-K? Next time we'll go into the dirty dark secrets of two Macs, an external hard-drive, and all those Facebook photos that my friends have posted that I want to steal, print what's printable, and start the process again.

Do any of you keep up with your pictures? What's your system? How many wallets does it take to hold all the wallet sized pictures you have? Do you (gasp) throw photos away after a certain period of time?

No really. I wanna know.