Old Photos Are Sometimes The Best Ones

Sometimes when I go though pictures in my archives I find the ones I love, really love, are nothing like what I take today. Today I know about lighting, aperture, shutter speed, composition, posing, all that stuff. I can take a random person and with some window light or a flash and a camera make a half decent shot of them. With a bit more time and control I can make a 3/4 decent shot of them (if I do say so myself).

Sometimes these pictures seem to lack the soul that the old ones have. Take the one here from August of 1996. It’s out of focus, badly composed, lacking any of the “rules” or suggestions that I’ve learned over the last 13 years with a camera in my hand. Honestly it’s not even taken by me, as I’m the figure on the diving board of Half Dome in Yosemite. Heck, do a search on Google or Flickr and you’ll find hundreds of pictures just like it.

Yet I think I could happily put this one on the wall. Why?

It’s pure memory, a trigger that brings me back to hiking up Half Dome for a day, when even my in-shape twenty-six year old body yelled at me for the length of it. It’s driving in Lawrence’s Silver Accord, with Sharie turning the back seat into a bed, or cocoon one might think, on the way down. It was the flat tire we had to fix after breakfast and the joy of putting our hands and feet on the bouldering walls at Camp 4 where some of the greatest climbers ever honed their craft.

All of that in a single, crappy, badly contrasted, out of focus, mostly grey picture.

Hopefully my pictures will be like that for other people some day. That’s why I don’t mind if the focus isn’t tack sharp all the time and why I love getting a shot where there’s a story. Someday Tony and his new wife, Kristine and Don, or Brian or Chris might look at one of my crappy, out of focus, not well composed shots and have it take them back to some moment in time that they love and want to revisit.

Here’s hoping.