Look at the birdie

It has been brought to my attention that I use a lot of pictures from my trips on the Main Street Gazette. In fact, Hitchhiking Ghosts (a blog you should be reading, if you aren’t already) even questioned the size of my photo collection. The question intrigued me because, well, I didn’t actually know how many pictures were in my collection. I went and looked back at 2008 alone, and came up with the staggering number of 3,574 pictures from two trips this year. This should well be enough, but I still have one more trip later this month that will certainly add to the total.

I know that there are photographers out there who have taken more pictures this year, most of them are probably of a better quality than mine as well, but it still stops one in their tracks. As I conferred with my wife about the photograph collection she asked me another, more poignant question, “Do you think you have enough?” Without really thinking about it, I responded with a quick, “No.”Why, you might ask, isn’t 3,500 enough? Because there is always more to capture. Lighting and weather conditions around attractions, lands, and icons. Details I have missed on previous trips, or details that I need better pictures of because mine came out blurry. There are always new attractions, and rehabs, and refurbishments. There are always new friends and family members. Because, as great as all the photographers of Walt Disney World are, I want my own personal history of the parks and resorts.

For those of you old enough to remember before memory cards and digital cameras with rechargeable batteries, cameras used to be loaded with film, generally with twenty-four pictures per roll, and you couldn’t see the picture until you paid to have it developed. Now it’s point, click, check the small screen, point, and click again and then compile the photographs on your computer when you get back to it. In years past, thirty-five hundred pictures was, in fact, a complete collection, sometimes a lifetime of photographs. Being of an age when I can remember having to be cautious what picture I took and how I took it (because if you messed it up, chances were you didn’t know it until it was too late), I am in love with digital cameras.Now, I can document every place, person, memory, and minor event that I choose, and I can take multiple shots just to make sure I get it right. There is no film cost, and memory cards are reusable. I, unlike my father before me, can take as many pictures as I want to document Walt Disney World as it is on the days I am able to be there. To be fair, it isn’t just Walt Disney World, I also snap shots of almost every other place I frequent and every gathering of family and/or friends I attend.

Will I take 3,500+ pictures of Walt Disney World every year? Chances of that are slim, but I am sure there will be years when I get up there. For now, I am okay with capturing my own personal history of where I have been, what I have seen, and who I shared the magical moments with, no matter how many clicks of the camera it takes. My children will look back on these pictures one day, shudder, smile, and say, “That’s dad.”