Taking Pictures

My daddy used to stop at scenic overviews and snap one or two pictures, then we'd move on down the road.  By the time we got home and the slides of the trip were returned in a yellow box, my parents tried to remember where each one might have been taken.  He used a camera he borrowed from work, and the tan case was cracked from years of use.

When we were grown, my brother showed me a drawerful of boxes of  undeveloped photograph, and I could barely imagine the restraint it would take to leave camera rolls in their boxes all those years.  Me, I'd have to rush to the photo booth the minute I clicked the last picture on the roll, and I'd stand pacing outside waiting to see my treasures.

My mother takes the occasional picture of flowers, but she can ride for miles without taking a picture of anything.  She soaks it up in the moment, but isn't compelled to save it.

I inherited my daddy's love of making pictures.  My children, grandchildren, and friends have rarely seen me without a camera strapped around my neck.

I started with a used 35mm camera from a  thrift shop, 1971; from there, I moved through several cameras, from Canons to Nikons, with micro and wide screen lenses.  As I begin this trip, I have a camera with a telephoto lens (the regular lens broke a couple of years ago); a compact Nikon; and an iPhone5.  I love the immediacy of digital photography, as well as all the little apps and special effects that alter the original images.  I love the no-limits of taking thousands of pictures,  then deciding later which ones to keep, which ones to delete.

This morning, I've been scrolling through other people's pictures on Pinterest.  I searched for Verona, Venice, and the Cinque Terre in Italy.  Then, Greece: iconic blue-roofed villages, boats in harbors, marketplaces, and weavers--you name it.  Virtual travel is no substitute for the real thing, but it's its own delightful thing to do if you find yourself awake in the middle of the night with nowhere to go.

When we come home from travel, pictures taken on a journey evoke the moments they were taken.  We lay them out on the table, make albums and digital slideshows, maybe enlarge and frame a few.  We show them to our friends.  For me, though, the best part is the moment of snapping the picture, sometimes doing a U-Turn to get a particular image that calls out from the road.  

I am a scopophile--a lover of looking.
The acquisitive part of me can't resist clicking what I see through the camera lens--to freeze a magical moment in time.

When my friend Nellie and I got off the train in Verona eight years ago, and as we walked through the colorful curvy streets, I thought: this place, more than any other matches the contours of my psyche.  Tight labyrinthine streets, faces in open windows, and the juxtaposition of buildings in ancient colors made me feel I was walking in a familiar dream.  As I look at pictures of my favorite places in Italy, I'm seized by a sudden desire to go back there, to wander those streets again.

Maybe next year.