Photo Apocalypse

      As we all know, I've been on the range for the last week/week and a half.  And it has been Hell.  Hell on me.  Hell on my family.  Hell on my poor blog.  I've managed a couple of posts from my phone.  Over the last couple days, I've sent some pictures with the posts.  From my phone.

      Really, most of the pictures on this blog come from my phone because uploading pictures from our camera is a pain in the rear for reasons that are boring and no one really cares about.  Suffice to say, our desktop computer has issues and uploading pictures is a pain in the rear.

      At least a couple nights a week, I upload a picture of the delicious dinner I've prepared in an effort to compensate for working too much from my phone.  The pictures are always blurry and poorly lit and rarely capture just how delicious my excursions into ethical cooking have become.  Seriously, I am now an AWESOME vegetarian, humane, ethical cook.  Awesome.  You should totally follow Cheap Wine and Cookies on FB if you're interested.  ----->

       So looking over my blog at all my shabby, blurry, unflattering phone pictures, I got to thinking.  The majority of my wonderful blog and Facebook friends post copious amounts of pictures, and I love it.  Some of them are great (I estimate that approximately 6 gajillion of my friends are now aspiring photographers), some are just random blurry phone shots like mine, some are somewhere in between - taken with better phone cameras while not holding a squirmy 10 month old.  (WHAT?  10 months?  WTF?  When did that happen?!?!!!)

      I remember back in the day when you had to buy film to put into your camera if you wanted to take pictures.  I remember when, once you snapped the shot, that was it.  You wouldn't get to see it until you got it developped, and one of your precious limited number of exposures (up to 37 if you were really fancy) was gone.

      I remember the excitement of picking up freshly developped pictures to discover how they had turned out.  Some were awesome.  Some were wastes.

      Back then, you really thought about pictures before you took them.  And sharing them was an entirely different story.  Remember vacation slide shows?  Photo albums?  Mailing baby pictures to everyone you know?

      These days you just toss them up on Facebook.  I know I'm guilty of putting up 6 or 7 pictures of Flintstone that are almost identical because I couldn't decide on just one.  I mean, come on, he IS the cutest baby EVER, after all.

      These days, you can snap a picture of what you're cooking for dinner to share with the world.  Post detailed photos of every step of a craft or project to your blog.  Images of the mudane are pervasive.  Stacks of books, knitting needles, new seedlings, and messy livingrooms abound. 

      And I love it.  Even before digital photography, I was a photographer of the mundane.  I still treasure random pictures from my youth of various rooms of our house, our back yard, our motor home in the parking lot of a local gas station.  They're not artsy shots, but I love them because they captured my every day life.

      These days, I love seeing those types of pictures all over the interwebs.  I have them all over my computer, but I rarely, if ever, print any of them out.  I'm quite guilty of forgetting to print out even the pictures I want to.  We have printed and sent pictures of Flintstone to friends and relatives, and we have a few floating around the house, but I have yet to frame any of the ones I've been meaning to.  The same goes for recent pictures of Punky.

      I love photos.  I treasure them.  But the VAST majority of our photos are digital.  Sure, they're backed up abd whatnot, but what happens when the Mayan Apocalypse wipes everything out? 

      MacGyver and I are big fans of the Mayan Apocalypse business.  We have been planning a huge party in December of 2012 since before we even got married.  I'm not even kidding.  If you want to come, drop a comment or email me - CheapWineandCookies [at] g mail and such.

      Do we actually think the magnetic poles will switch and the world will collapse into utter chaos?  Probably not.  It will be another Y2K letdown ;-).  But the documentaries amuse the heck out of us, and we both happen to have intricacies in our astrological charts that fit in with the "prophesies" to an extremely entertaining degree.

     So, when we're bored, we discuss our post-apocalyptic plans.  MacGyver plans out crazy gyroscopic floating house plots in case we find ourselves in a water world.  I contemplate which plants would be the best to grow for food, whether we should have goats, and just how many babies I'd want to have without any hope of medical care.  You know, that sort of thing ;-)

     We even went to Chichen Itza on our honeymoon.  And we got a painting of our anniversary date done according to the Mayan Calendar.  (Another thing that needs to be framed and hung up).

Yes, we are DORKS!  As if you didn't already know that!

      Really, though, I find myself wondering what comes next.  It feels like it's all building up to something.  Punky and Flintstone are growing up in a world where basically every moment of their existance has been catalogued visually, but in a format that could be gone in an instant. 

      Exactly what is the face of photography today?  Can you even call the random pictures of everyday banality photography, or is that a title reserved for wedding photogs and the paparazzi? 

       When the world turns upside down, or the internets collapse, or even when the house burns down, where will it all go?  And how will we adapt without it?

      As you can see, this week has completely wiped my brain.