Pixels preserved on paper

I printed all of my digital photos at Sam's Club today, all of them up to July 31st. Everything that made it from my SD card into the special holding pen on my hard drive and then got copied onto CD-R's (four identical copies containing everything up to 6/25/05, one containing everything up to 7/31/05). 518 pictures.

You can reconstruct several stories from these photos. Here is a large white-and-orange dog with black-outlined eyes posing in a bedroom; here she is lounging under a Rhododendron; here she is going for a walk; here she is rubbing noses with a Beagle; here she is next to an Azalea; and here she is on her dog bed, her legs stretched out stiffly, unnaturally. And after that, no more photos of her.

Here is a little girl playing with what might be her parents and their extended family; here she is in her Sunday best, standing on a trampoline; here she is poking her head through an opening in a grapevine. And here is a picture of a framed photograph of her that has been tucked into the casket of a bald man in his late middle age. And here she is again, at a banquet hall, with those same family members, only now they are all dressed in black, including a man who looks very much like the man in the casket.

It's surprising how some of the pictures seem more real now that they exist on paper than they did when they were just images on a screen. Sam's Club did an excellent job with them, too, making passable images out of many night shots and indoor bar shots that were just too dark and grainy for me to process into anything worthwhile. But they did, somehow. One of them is a photo of Haley that I was never able to make look good. They succeeded where I failed, and I'm grateful.