Celebrating the Ordinary

11/29/2005
Recently I bought a new digital camera. It's a Nikon Coolpix S4. I love it. It has a 10x optical zoom! Suffice it to say it's awesome, because that's not really what I wanted to write about. With purchase of said camera, came a free digital camera class. The class also was very good, full of interesting digital photography tidbits, like how jpeg image compression works, and neat home projects you could do, such as printing pictures 4 to a page on both sides and then with the employ of scissors and stapler, making a booklet out of it.

The teacher of the class, as a life long computer guy and photographer, concluded the class by talking about celebrating the ordinary, in photos. He pointed out, quite correctly, that photos taken of ordinary and boring things 50 years ago are fascinating today because of all that has changed. "Look at that old car!" people say seeing an ordinary car in a photo that old. Yes, today's cars, clothes, and hairstyles will come to look quaint, old fashioned and amazing, in the fullness of time. Even my brand spankin' new state-of-the-frikin-art Nikon Coolpix S4 is going to look itself like an antique Land camera some day. He brought to the class some pictures he had from the civil war -- of his own ancestors! So, he encouraged us to take pictures of ordinary things -- celebrating the ordinary -- that could become extrordinary just from the passage of time.

So here are some pictures I took today, of my car and other cars -- cars as they were in the first decade of the millennium! Not the best weather today though. My car is the ubiquitous beige Toyota Corolla (1996). Wow, it's nine years old now... It's been a good car!

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