I know that some people can size up a person pretty quickly by
the way they dress and the company they keep. But, frankly, now
that I’ve been looking at vacation photos this summer, I think you
never really know a person until you see what kind of vacation
pictures they take.
I know that some people can size up a person pretty quickly by the way they dress and the company they keep. But, frankly, now that I’ve been looking at vacation photos this summer, I think you never really know a person until you see what kind of vacation pictures they take.
I mean, let’s face it: When people go on vacation, they bring back reams of film containing pictures of things that no one else in the whole world, and possibly the entire universe, would be interested in. For instance, when my friend Julie went to Europe a couple summers ago, instead of snapping photographs of the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower or Stonehenge, she brought back 32 rolls of cathedral ceilings. Ceilings! For the 10 years I’ve known Julie, I had never suspected that she was this passionate about stained glass and ceiling art.
And that’s not all. My friend Linda, who has no children of her own, has three photo albums filled with pictures of her cats, all taken during her vacation in Venice. Now I’ve always been a big animal lover and all that, but this somehow just seems, well, wrong.
But one of the best things about these pictures, despite their obvious flaws, is that they can’t help but tell us a great deal about the people who took them.
I first learned that lesson several years ago, when my then-5-year-old son returned from his first camping trip. I naively opened the envelope expecting to see pictures of the nightly campfire, the sun setting over the forest and possibly even a deer or two.
But instead of all that, I saw an off-center picture of tennis shoes. And not even his tennis shoes mind you, but rather a pair someone had lost and left in the cabin – mystery shoes. As I went through the stack, I also found my son had taken a picture of his sleeping bag, a penny he found in the gravel next to the car, a leaf, an orange sock, a bag of marshmallows, a close-up of his father’s ear, the tree outside his cabin from six different angles, a crushed snail, a burned hot dog, something blurry, the backseat of the car, a Power Ranger toothbrush, his thumb, a piece of gum and himself.
There was barely a sign of nature in the whole stack. I couldn’t help thinking that if he wanted pictures of assorted junk, it would’ve been cheaper if he had spent the weekend in the backyard taking pictures of the sandbox.
During the last several years, his photography has improved, but he’s still taking snapshots of seemingly random images – my neighbor’s iPod, our car’s front left tire, his soccer ball and himself.
Just to see what she’d think, I showed a bunch of his photos to my friend, Julie, the mother of three teenagers, who said simply, “There’s nothing wrong with these.” But of course, this is just the type of answer you’d expect from someone who photographs ceilings.
Then she told me about the time her daughter went to Yosemite Valley and returned with dozens of rolls of film, all filled with photographs of the hotel, restaurant and gift shop. And about the time her son took his camera to a pro baseball game and returned with pictures of cloud formations. I, however, had a feeling she was just trying to make me feel better.
Then again, to children, finding a penny is more exciting than seeing a squirrel. And, for goshsakes, why waste his good film on something like, say, a herd of endangered water buffalo, when you could take a picture of cool tennis shoes? Or his shiny new green sleeping bag? Face it, things like beautiful sunsets and campfires can’t compare to a bag of extra large marshmallows.
So I’ve done what any good mother would do: I’ve marked the dates on my son’s pictures and have them all in our family vacation photo album – right after the five pages of ice sculptures I took several years ago on our cruise to the Bahamas.
Debbie Farmer is a humorist and a mother holding down the fort in California, and the author of Don’t Put Lipstick on the Cat. You can reach her at
fa********@oa***************.com
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