Photo Finished

I love a good photograph.

Every couple years we dress everyone in matching shirts, like the people in those horrible stock photos you find in new photo frames. We head to the mall in Durham and pose for seemingly endless snapshots. And going into it you know you're going to get real high-quality pictures only if by the end you're close to tears from yelling at your kids to stay still, smile, sit up, don't kick your sister, and for God's sake stop untucking your shirt!

Not that the fidgetiness is the children's fault. After all, you're the one who booked a lunchtime studio session and forgot to pack any fishy crackers or YooHoos. If they've turned into whining little ankle biters it's only because they haven't eaten since 7:00am and their blood sugar levels have dipped well out of "cranky" and deep into "monstrous."

More often than not, the camera man or woman works some kind of magical charm and we end up taking home four hundred dollars worth of pictures of the very same people we see every day.

Not so tonight, however.

In a manner quite uncharacteristic to our frequently well-planned approach to life in general -- or I should say, my Lovely Wife's well-planned approach, since I am more like a clusterbomb of disorganization -- we didn't even begin coordinating our attire for our 4:50pm photo session until somewhere between 4:00pm and 4:10pm.

I should point out we were not driving the hour-and-a-half to Durham this time. The photo session was at our church in Southern Pines, just fifteen minutes away, and the ultimate goal of the session was to produce a single church-directory-worthy picture of our five-person clan. We accomplished that goal but it didn't stop the photographer from snap-happily clicking away another couple dozen times to try and produce that gem of a picture we wouldn't be able to help but buy fifty copies of for all of our relatives, living and deceased.

While we had a great time taking the pictures, once we sat down to view the results we immediately began tearing them apart.

"My left eye is closed," our Darling Daughter said about one.

"Why does he look like a possessed demon in half the pictures," I said of the Italian.

"My arms look so fat," my Lovely Wife complained. "Do I have my mother's arms?"

"Your arms are nothing, look at my big floppy ears!" I said. "Those things don't stop growing 'til you're dead!"

In some of the pictures it looked like the German was recovering from a stroke that left him able to smile with only half his face. In almost every picture I was smiling so hard you could see more gums than teeth. And there wasn't a single picture in which we all appeared comfortable. We looked more like the poster family for some new hemorrhoid cream.

But my favorite picture was the one with just me and my true love of eighteen years, my Lovely Wife. With me sitting and her standing with her arm around my back, it looked like I was her terminally ill husband and she was propping me out of my sickbed for one last shot to send the grandkids before throwing me in a pine box. Even the expression on my face suggested I might be dangerously close to needing a change of diaper or a fresh colostomy bag.

If nothing else, this round of photos proved I need to stand at least eight feet back from the rest of my family to appear in proportion with them. Either they are tiny people with tiny heads, or I am a lumbering oaf with a head the size of a prize pumpkin.

From now on, we'll leave the family portraits to the professionals -- the nineteen-year-old college kids who run the franchise shop at the mall.



© 2010 Mark Feggeler

Protecting Precious Memories

This week started with our family in DC visiting monuments and museums, bonding over outrageously over-priced government-approved cafeteria food and taking long walks across the National Mall.

We took hundreds of photographs on our new fancy camera -- after all, it can hold 2,500 hi-res images. Pictures of pandas at the National Zoo, Kermit the Frog at the Museum of American History, and my Lovely Wife's excursion to the Tidal Basin complete with a ride on a rented pedal boat.

Upon returning home, one of the first things I did was to download all those new memories to our iMac. They downloaded as they normally do and I deleted them from the camera, as I also normally do. By the following morning, however, our normally reliable iMac was taking thirty minutes to boot up and a further twenty minutes to display any icons. Sitting there, starting to sweat at the thought of the computer crashing, I swear I heard a single church bell ring in the distance.

A Sunday trip to the Apple Store in Durham turned into a day-long exercise in waiting as one of the resident Geniuses backed up our data to a newly-purchased external drive and then reformatted our hard drive, wiping it clean and reinstalling the operating system. Eight hours after leaving for Durham, we returned home and I plugged in the reconstituted iMac.

It didn't start. It sat there, glowing at me, refusing to boot. Only a small gray apple appeared on the screen as if to mock us for our efforts.

Oh well, at least we have the data backed up, I thought. Unfortunately, when connected to our laptop, the external drive whirred and chirped like a cricket on crack and also defiantly refused to boot. That single distant church bell became a full funerary march. No longer sweating for fear of having to purchase a new computer, I was now coming undone emotionally at the thought of having lost the nine years of photographs that had been stored on the iMac.

I could care less about Word documents or Excel files or music and movies purchased through iTunes. It might be problematic but I can always recreate files and re-purchase media. But how do you replace photographs? I imagine I felt like people who have lost their personal belongings in a house fire. My mind raced through the catalog of 12,000-plus images as though it might help me recall them later.

In the end, the external drive had backed up everything properly, it's just that our older laptop didn't have the right USB ports to support the peripheral device. Back at the Apple Store in Durham the very next daty we confirmed the data existed, I bought a new computer, and the very first thing I did when I got home was to ensure the photographs made it onto the new machine. They now reside on two separate hard drives and I will religiously back up new pictures on a regular basis.

The fear of possibly losing all those precious memories got me thinking. Being a fan of crunching numbers, I assessed what the loss of those 12,000 images might have meant to our family.

Gathered over the course of nine years, those pictures represent roughly 21% of my life in pictures. They are 58% of our married life, 72% of our daughter's life, and 100% of our sons' lives. Imagine the thought of losing the entire photographic history of your life due to a parent who didn't properly back up the computer and a faulty back up drive purchased as a Hail Mary effort to catch everything before it disintegrates into digital oblivion.

Call me a wuss or a wimp or whatever you like but I can tell you that a tear rolled down my cheek when I finally restored all the photographs. I was so ecstatic I couldn't even sit at the computer. I literally skipped down the hallway like a giddy child, and I am pretty sure that I shouted "Whoopee!" just like they do in those old black and white movies.

Even more than learning a lesson about backing up my hard drive, I learned that nothing makes you appreciate your family more than the simple act of casting your mind back through time to recall precious moments you took for granted were safely filed away for future perusal. As much as I cherish all the pictures we saved this weekend, they are just static glimpses --reminders of the moments -- and the memories they help call to mind are the real treasures.