Evolution Of My Blog and Photos...

Morgan, your comments have inspired me to write this particular blog... I hope that you and others will continue to enjoy reading my ramblings about my family, critters, travels, or just watching my precious grandson grow.   I want to say thanks to all of you who have made comments via email, Facebook, or on my blog itself and for encouraging me.  I am certainly not a professional photographer and I am fairly new at blogging.  I'm really not sure what I am doing, but I am having fun sharing my thoughts and pictures.   For those of you who have followed from the beginning, you know my travels to South Africa was the inspiration and start of my blog in October 2010.  I knew I would not have access to my cell phone while traveling and this gave me a way to communicate and share photos with Ashley and friends throughout our adventure.

My daughter, Ashley, found a company to print a portion of my blog into a hardcover book covering our trip to South Africa and gave it to me as a surprise... I love it!

Dennis and I have 122 pages of great memories of a fabulous trip

After returning home from our travels,  I then ventured into posting a few random things and when Tully arrived, I had no problem of having enough pictures or things to share.

I am now compiling my first photo book of Tully on my laptop.  My MacBook Pro has a program called iPhoto and it has various photo book themes to select from.  I don't really know the maximum number of pages I can put in a book just yet, but I have 78 so far; so I will just keep adding new pages as he grows.  It gives me the option to place pictures with or without captions and has various layouts for 1-6 pictures per page.  The program is simple to operate but does have it's limitations.  The book will be hardcover with pictures on front and back.  It also comes with the loose cover and gives me space to write on the front and back flaps.  Maybe I can get a few months of Tully's life in this first book before printing it... and surely the number of pictures I take will slow down at some point.  They call them grandchildren for a reason and while I might be partial, I obviously think Tully is pretty grand!

I reflect back on the way I used to compile a photo book-- for me, starting in the 70's, first taking the pics on 110 film but eventually advancing to 35mm!  I got to select from all the great speeds of film 100, 200, 400, 800, etc... depending on the action in the picture!

I thought we had a nice camera...
I'm sure you can recall the flash cubes that attached.
And we were even known to use disposable cameras before we had this!

As you can see our 35mm camera was nothing fancy either,
but it did have a built in flash!

I would then send the film off to have it developed... "Owl Photo" was one of my favorite places to send my film to, they seemed to have the best prices; but later I could take them to Wal-Mart, Mays Drug or such places locally.  I used to put my negatives in my safe deposit box (well some of them, when I remembered) in case of a house fire... thank goodness that has never happened to us.

I do also recall when the Polaroid camera came out and within a few seconds it would spit the picture out!

We had this Polaroid at the same time we had the 110 camera

I remember waving the Polaroid picture in the air as it developed being careful not to touch it... as if waving it would really help, but within seconds I had instant gratification of seeing the picture!

We also owned 2 different versions of the movie cameras, I cringe as I think about the Polavision cassettes that we have, with no way to play them...

Polavision Camera

Projector for the Polavision
which no longer works!!

And I must not forget the infamous VHS Cam Corder we owned...

...for now we can still play these videos!

I guess I still have the great memories in my head!  I keep thinking that one day I'll find a place to have them all converted to... well, what would I convert them to?  DVD's... and when will those be obsolete?  There's just something about having an actual photo in my hand to look at.

Regarding my still photos, I would place my pictures in photo books; actually I placed them in photo books for a few years, but that fell by the wayside and now I have shoe boxes and trunks full of photos.  You may remember the books that had the little black corners you placed on the page and then put the photo inside those corners... then I graduated to the photo books that had the clear pages that you lifted the flap and then placed the pics on the page that had those sticky lines... which now over the years have faded most of my pics!  But, I also do have some of the photo books with those clear sleeves that you just slide your photos into... and some of those had a space to write captions.

I managed to complete a scrapbook of our FreeWheel Bicycle trip across the State of Oklahoma ending up in Arkansas; and have started a couple other scrapbooks on vacations to England and New Zealand... but those two are yet to be completed.

So now our simple point and shoot digital camera provides me a new way to keepsake precious photos and I think this has been my best way yet!  Maybe one day I'll spend the money and buy a better quality digital camera.

Ashley and John own a nice digital camera with various lenses,
but she told me the other day "while the quality is nice, Mom,
it's capturing the moments that count!"

I don't know why I was reluctant at first to change from my 35mm to the digital?  Just change itself, I guess.  But I am so glad that I made the transition.  Taking that tiny SD card on vacation is much more simple than lugging numerous rolls of film and fearing the x-ray machines at the airport!!  I had even bought the lead bags to place my film rolls in, but who knows if they really made any difference... and who wants to pay for the "lead" weight now at an airport!


In the digital world, we have all heard the horror stories of people losing all their photos because their computer crashed!!  So, thanks to my daughter, I do backups to an external drive and this gives me hope that I won't lose my photos.  Ashley is much more computer savvy then me.  I guess the key is printing the photos and placing the external drive in a fireproof location... our safe is as fireproof as it gets for me.  I have to laugh, because there is nothing valuable in the safe, only things we don't want to lose!


Who knows what the future will hold as to cameras, but for now-- my digital camera, laptop, blog, and iPhoto will help create and share my memories.  I will have faith that the photo pages in my printed books will not fade.   I hope that one day Tully will enjoy reading about how much he is loved and how precious we think he is.  I hope he will have great memories of spending time with Grammy and PawPaw.

...the best memories will be in our hearts and our minds!