Regarding travel photography, seriously, what is the deal with the picture taking?  As we stood on the platform to catch our train to Rome some time ago, a platform that was amazingly small in a train station that was puny in a hill town that was about 2000 people from being left off the map, we suddenly saw a group of travelers run up the stairs from the tunnel and start snapping thousands of pictures…of nothing.  The tracks.  The station.  The lack of trains.  The lack of anything.  Seriously, there were 7 of us on the platform waiting for a Sunday morning train and there were 45 people taking pictures of weeds and cigarette butts on the tracks.  The episode took me right to that scene in Caddyshack.  “Hey Wang!  What’s with the pictures?  It’s a parking lot, alright  Come on.”

I am starting to think that digital photography was a bad idea.

When I was just a boy, my dad took many pictures.  He took hours setting up each picture, developed them into slides and made us look at them. The images would move from one to another, along with the sounds of the fan whirring and the carrousel cha-chinging and cha-chinging from one to another. Images of me, posing in my 5th grade Halloween Spider-Man costume, were splashed up on a wall or screen for all to see.  I love those slides.  He recently had them converted to digital (I‘ll show you the costume ones for a small fee) and sent them to me.  A thousand photos from over the years.  Yeah, I know, he cut that down from the 1500 or so he took to save a bit on the digital transfer, but around 1000 photos.  I took that many this month or on any one of the many trips we take. My wife takes that many, too.  That’s 2000 pictures of all kinds of shit.  And everyone is doing it.  I can’t get through 5 steps in a museum without stopping 8 times for someone to take another picture of of every piece to send back to his family, or of his girlfriend in front of another statue of another dead guy painting, holding the camera or a phone at arm’s length to be as awkward as possible. Or, of course, there are the times I find myself probably looking like another random douche bag in another picture taken by another guy of his girlfriend in front of another statue of another…you get it.  I’m king of the accidental photo bomb. I mean, how much would it cost to buy film, take 2000 pictures and process all of them?  Now?  Nothing.  It makes everyone feel like Ansel Adams.  Anyway, maybe we should all just switch to video, or simply use the best image processor in the world…our eyes and our brains.

Deep breath, baby. I have to go buy me a selfie stick.

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Cheers! Clink.