Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Photo hoarder



As you can probably guess, I take photos like they're going out of style. I do delete the out-of-focus ones, but that hasn't always been my habit. Even if I don't use them, I keep them. Plus I resize them, sometimes into two smaller versions - and I keep them. I can't let go of them. I even saved the photos of roses that have left the garden. Makes me think of apron strings.

Some gardeners cut flowers for the house. I don't. I take photos. I love to see the flowers on the bushes and scattered everywhere in the garden. Perhaps it's because I'm a fairly new gardener who has lived most of her gardening life with very young plants that don't bloom as profusely as large mature plants. So some neurosis, similar to growing up in the depression, compels me to leave the flowers in their natural place.

Some gardeners keep journals. I don't. I keep photos. Sometimes daily photos. Sometimes 100 daily photos. The folders are named with the date - like a journal. I don't need to write about the garden. I can see the garden, the growth of the plants over time, the color variation of blooms from cool spring to hot summer, and the maturing of every phase and part of the garden. I like seeing. Seeing is retaining. Seeing is never forgetting. Seeing is always having and never losing. When it's dark outside, I can see the garden at noon. When it's raining, I can see the sunlit roses. Seeing almost displaces touching and smelling.

Photography may have shaped a different perspective on gardening in me. The garden from behind a camera lens may look different from the garden completely unobscured. Without the camera I sometimes miss the ability to zoom, under-appreciating the larger view. The practice of cherry-picking my shots may make the 'real' garden seem inadequate. Do I put the camera in my pocket long enough to stop and smell the flowers? Do two hands holding the camera mean no hands holding a flower?


Can there be a downside to photo hoarding? Not the cost. With no film to develop or pay for, the sky's the limit, right? Hmm, maybe not. My hard drive is the limit. I just checked. I have 106 Gb of free space on my C: drive and only 30.4 Gb of photos in the My Pictures folder. That means room for maybe four more years of photos. Ah-ha, the computer has two other hard drives, so maybe the sky is the limit... unless I get a camera with more megapixels. Then all bets are off.

8 comments:

  1. You are too funny! Thanks for the idea of adding more hard drives to my computer. My family has the silly notion of deleting my garden pictures. (I do move them to cds just in case I NEED that flower picture from two years ago.)

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  2. I also love to keep pictures of my flowers and gardens.

    Photography has opened up a whole new world for me too.

    FlowerLady

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  3. I do the same. Photos daily, all saved, whether they're blurry or not. No bouquets of flowers in the house - I want the blooms on the plants. And I love going back and looking at the flower photos at night, different seasons, etc. Maybe that's why we blog - to share our over-abundant photos of the garden!

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  4. I, too, have a hard time deleting pics from my computer. I'm working now to at least get them organized. It is wonderful to see how plants and the garden change.

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  5. Oh, yes, Kay, pile on the hard drives! We love our photos!

    FlowerLady, how could we not keep our garden photos? They're so beautiful - forever. It does add a new dimension to gardening and broadens our horizons.

    HolleyGarden, maybe we're twins separated at birth. It's amazing that we think the same way. Poor you. Love your blog lately. I've just been too busy to comment. Sorry excuse but nonetheless true.

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  6. Susan, it's funny how we become so attached to each and every photo. Organizing them better is an excellent idea, almost an imperative one. When I did the Climbing Maman Cochet post, I collected all her pics into her folder. It was surprisingly easy, dragging pics en masse into the folder in the sidebar. I'm going to have to work on that, too.

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  7. Gorgeous photos. It reminds me that when I was in high school, I was always walking around taking photos of flowers. No one could understand the color and textures and simple pleasure of it. With a blog, it's nice to share with others who are fond of flowers and their photos. Nice!

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  8. Having grown up at a time when photography meant film and film meant developing and the whole business meant money -- digital cameras are such giddy things! Whatever I want I TAKE! This does bring on a semi-queasy yet gleeful sensation feeling like I'm doing something a little shady ...Enjoying your photos (and your blog title).

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