Photos

I love photos.

I love to look at them and recall trips I've gone on, people I've known, hairstyles and colors I've had. Photos can capture a look, a feeling, an emotion, a moment in time. For me, they're reminders of where I've been and how far I've come.

My brother's getting married in a few weeks and I get to do the video montage of photos that's going to play in the background at the reception. A fan of "go big or go home," I went big and created a 30-minute video with a great soundtrack and an accompanying 15-minute video of outtakes. I did pare it down to about 8 minutes of the best of the best pictures, everyone has blessed it and we're good to go.

I absolutely love doing these photo videos. They combine my love of music with my sense of nostalgia, a creative outlet that indulges the side of my brain that craves order and precision. I made one for my mother for Mother's Day, one for my youngest for her birthday last year, and one celebrating a family vacation to Hawaii.

I recall the days when you drove up to the Photomat booth, dropped off film and returned days later to pick up the developed photos. And then returned to get credit for the photos that didn't turn out. I remember when one-hour developing became a new thing, and how impressive that was. Along the years I had a Disc camera, a 110 camera, a 35 mm camera and one of those cameras that used the drop-in film canister and could also take panoramic photos.

And then came the digital camera and the mega-memory cards. Snap, snap, snap. We can look at them later and fix em up and make them turn out the way we want. Except I have an external hard drive full of semi-organized photos. That's going to be the project for another month...to go through, edit, remove red eye, crop and truly organize pictures. Once that's done, I can start scanning in the old photos Mom has in shoeboxes at her house.

Even though everything's digital, I still print a lot of pictures for picture frames and albums. I tried scrapbooking for a brief time but all I really got out of that is that I am not cut out for scrapbooking. So today was going through all the photos I had and dividing them into keep (and do something with), shred, or send piles. Having organized the rest of the house first, all the photos were in one central location. Popped in a movie and started sorting. I ended up with a stack of photos 14" high that I ended up taking to work and shredding (I don't like the idea of personal memories being tossed and available to anyone who wants to dumpster dive). Talk about cathartic.

The Ex ended up with a number of photos of him and the girls (along with some cards and other things I thought he might like. My favorite was the five pages of meticulously detailed notes he left his parents re: our daughter, when we went away for a weekend. He texted me and said "I'm starting to understand why you divorced me").

I ended up with lots of photos from trips I've taken and fun times I've had, and I'll be sending them off as I focus on strengthening my friendships and my communications with my friends. You can toss them out, that's fine. The memories will remain.