Taking a huge photo dump.

I’ve spent the past several days trying to ramp up my “photo dump” project and get enough stuff put together to fill a whole CD – and to my amazement, I haven’t come up with 750 megs worth of pictures yet. I’ve even gone back and organized all of the pictures I have on floppies from my older digital camera, and I’m still not there – and we’re talking about basically every digital photo that I’ve taken (and saved) since 1999. Something else I’ve discovered is that, anyone or anything you think you’ve taken a zillion photos of, you probably have, in reality, two or three dozen. When it came right down to it, I was amazed at how few photos I had of Chloe, or of Iago, and especially of Chelsea. (Conversely, you find that you’ve got a zillion photos of the most insignificant things imaginable.) What I do have so far is 4,057 pictures in 125 folders (which divide everything up by subject or sub-subject). Just about every critter here and at the farm has his or her own folder, though there are exceptions (cows and ostriches have “species folders”). There are folders for everyplace my wife and I have lived, and even my apartment in Green Bay. I have plenty of photos taken at work here (and in Green Bay), every gaming expo I’ve been to, and guest critters like Sampson and Gabby Cat. I still have a few stashes of floppies to locate and go through, but this is the vast majority of the pictures that I’ve taken in the past 7 years. I’ve made a concerted effort not to throw anything away; there were only a very few things I didn’t keep, and they tended to be old action figure shots I had taken for the Toybox section of the site, and other stuff along those lines. You don’t get that kind of self-editing when you have a roll of film developed, and I was going for the same idea here – even oddly-framed, off-centered pictures of horses are on there. Not to fill out space, but because one simply never knows. There’s a story behind every shot.
It amazes me how much some of the pictures bring back to me. There’s one floppy with some shots of our mostly-empty apartment, circa October ’99, with a strange hue of orange from the setting sun shining through the windows, and I remember that day – couldn’t tell you what day of the week it was exactly, and I’d have to right-click on the photo and look for the date – distinctly, walking around my new place in a daze, wondering what the hell kind of crazy thing I’d just done, moving back to Arkansas without a job. Amazing how that stuff comes flying back, isn’t it? And it’s mainly the orange light, and the somewhat disjointed series of shots (my temporary computer setup, a slightly out-of-focus Iago cleaning himself next to a laundry basket of dirty clothes, Othello snoozing on the couch). I’ve actually thought about posting some of these photos in the blog and retro-dating them to when they were originally taken, with only a line or two of text explaining the when and where; I might still do that, and probably create a new “old photos” category so you can find ’em if you want (or avoid ’em if you want).
Before I go there, though, I think I need to go to bed.