One of the best ways to preserve photographs is to create photobooks. It is also one of the most expensive. However, people are more receptive to look at your work in a book than a photo album or heaven forbid, a slide show. Nothing can chill a heart faster than “Let’s look at slides of my last vacation!”, unless of course, you signed up for a guided tour beforehand.
In the 70’s if you saw someone haul out the 500 lb. slide projector after dinner you were in big trouble. Worse, your Mother dusts off the album of you in your diapers and plops down beside your beau. Yipes!
A picture is worth a thousand words, but for some, a thousand pictures is worth only one word.
Monty Python had a fabulous take on this: “Here’s Ted beside the house…and there’s Ted in front of the house, and oh, look! There’s Ted behind the house…” while the captive audience tears up and throws each handed picture away.
One of my Mothers favourite photo albums was pictures of people she went on a trip with to Portugal. She couldn’t remember who they were, she was just happy to have had so many friends at once! Mom loved to be adored, she was a bit of a diva.
I loved a photobook a friend did of her trip to Africa. It was so good I requested some of the photo’s for myself. Others however bring their books out as bragging rights to exotic places I’ll never get to see.
Perhaps the worst bragging rights belongs to Professionals, who being paid to give a talk on their chosen profession, begin the talk with slides of their pregnant wife. Eeewww!
The absolute worse case belongs to a sales rep who came to our business with an album of his wife giving birth. In colour. He insisted we look at every picture (and there were a lot) while he gave us a running commentary. Ugh!
And then there was the man who dropped off a photo album for me at my office, which contained pictures of women in bondage. Sorry – but that did not go unpunished, I reported him.
So come to think of it, all my photo’s of Sam, sunsets, forests, lakes and the odd awful selfie don’t seem so bad after all. I won’t make you look at all of them. Maybe, just one….or two…
