"But what is life without documentation?!"

[DanaC]

I borrowed a line from one of Sundae's posts for the title of this thread, because as I read it it sparked a thought:

My relationship with the world has altered. Altered in subtle, almost unnoticed ways. I never really had much time for cameras. Wasn't something I gave much thought to. From time to time a holiday or an event might provoke the purchase of a disposable camera, often lost before ever getting to the developer. It barely occurred to me to record even major events, let alone a new haircut, my new shoes, or the view out my window (the possible exception to this being pictures of Pilau which I used to take with mum's camera).

Getting a digital camera, and being part of a community that engages in trivia-sharing as such a basic part of its identity, has changed this.

I looked back at a bunch of pictures currently sitting in My Documents. One of them is of an electric slow-cooker....filled with broth. That's it, just a cooker and its contents. There's also a picture of a very heavily chewed cock (*grins*, a rubber cockerel that is, as chewed by the Pilster).

So, when I read Sundae's post I thought, yes I lead a documented life. My relationship with the minutiae of my life has altered.

This led on to me thinking about others ways in which my world has changed. Changes in the ways I access knowledge and my expectations of the same. Changes in my relationship with entertainment and my expectations of that. At the core, all these changes relate to communication. Even my expectations of when and how I, or others, will be available for contact has been fundamentally altered by the mobile phone.

Every so often it's quite exciting to think about how much and how fast our world (and what it means to be us) is changing.

[Sundae]

My interaction with the world started to change when my parents and I both had camera phones. Dads has always documented our lives photographically - it was wonderful to receive and send them pictures as and when things happened.

I remember sending a close friend of mine a picture of an amazing piece of parallel parking I'd just done! I was just so proud of it.

I’ve tried to rein myself in on here. My first reaction now is to say, “Photo please!” and that’s not really fair. Description is what I thrive on – I’d far rather read a book than see a film, so who am I to devalue someone’s word by insisting a picture is necessary?

That said, I do love the fact that (some) people on here have the same child-like glee in minutae that I grew up with, and still love my Dad for. They still take pictures of interesting food and shop signs and their hotel bedroom window etc when they go on holiday. And I still want to see it. It’s just that it’s available immediately now, and not in two weeks time through the post.

We do share trivia. I love it. The pictures are an added dimension. And lovely to look back on.

I didn’t really say anything there, just rambled. Want a picture instead?

[Cyclefrance]

Adding to the 'minutae' element...

I'm not the greatest photographer - my pictures seldom record what I am looking at (hope you know what I mean - it looks a great shot through the viewfinder, but then, somehow, the result turns out to be rather flat). On top of that I always come back from my trips thinking 'why didn't I take a picture then - that would have been really good to have been able to include that'. So I seem to miss out on a lot of events that I should have recorded.

The plus side?

Well, I have discovered more and more with digital photography, that a seemingly poor shot cannot help but contain some interesting elements (minutae), and the beauty of the digital world is that you can extract these parts, but ignore the rest. So, for example, a glistening section of a picture depicting the gilded gates to Versailles can be lifted from an otherwise bland picture of the overall frontage - and then presented in all its glory, elsewise lost to the passing eye.

The funny thing is that I never see these minutae until after the event. So there's generally a number of pleasant surprises presented when I get round to viewing my pictures on an enlarged scale for the first time. The minutae of life are so often concealed at first - how nice it is to be able to unmask them so easily and readily nowadays - something that would have been a pretty involved task to achive pre-digital photography.

I have a picture from the Paris trip that shows us all sitting outside a cafe in a place called Rue. I was going to show it as a whole. And then my eye fell upon the actual glasses of beer, in various stages of consumption and nicely catching the light of the sun. Just showing these tells a story in itself - probably more so than the the bigger picture of the 4 blokes sitting on chairs outside the cafe - the beers are lost in this larger picture and therefore so is their significance.

[classicman]

I love the written word when it is done in a way that the images seem to just appear in my mind as my eyes cascade over the words. I can get into a book and the entire world around me will vanish into oblivion. It's like every trouble, concern or worry I have melts away and there is nothing other than the story I am reading.
On the other hand - a poorly written book is nothing more than a waste of my time - I cannot get into it like a well written story. It just doesn't "transform" me.
That being said, I enjoy pictures as well - especially older ones of people. Looking into the eyes of someone from 50 or 100 years ago is fascinating to me. There is no way to do that with the written word.

[HungLikeJesus]

My brother lives in a different state and sometimes sends me pictures if he's on a bike ride to someplace interesting.

I've started a game I call picture detective, where I try to figure out where the picture was taken and go searching for information that I then send him.

For example, the other day he sent me a picture of himself with a sign in the background. Then, based on the sign, the time of day, angle of the sun and other clues, I was able to figure out what town he was in, the name of the trail he was on and, from that, I then found a picture that someone else had taken from the same location and angle. I sent this to him in an e-mail that was waiting for him when he got back from his ride.

[Shawnee123]

I document with writing things down. (This is kind of what we do here, no?) I have notebook after notebook of my High School journals...very interesting to look back on.

classic, you reminded me of the picture they found recently of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan. It's beautiful, the looks on their faces...and it gives me chills yet thrills me to see it.

I don't do pictures just because I can't stand the sight of myself.

[glatt]

I was in California for the weekend. I had to come back for work, but left my family there for a few extra days so they could ride the cable cars, etc. My brother is with them and has been e-mailing me pictures he took with his iPhone. It's nice to see what they are doing. Documentation good.