For Old Payne’s memorial week Dad and I digitized old photos and put them into a slideshow. It seemed as though the family enjoyed watching the pictures go by as a nice group activity and it at least gave me something to do that felt productive and helpful.
Dad did the hard part (scanning) and I just cropped and resized them for televisor viewing. Given the low resolution available, my impulse was to crop everything tight. I soon realized, however, that the interesting bits of a lot of the pictures were in the backgrounds.
Here‘s a picture of me and some girlfriend or cousin or both (just kidding, I’m pretty sure that’s a cousin) at the lake that would have been a perfect candidate for cleaning up. It would have been simple enough to even clone out that crazy camper frame around $COUSIN’s head, but the Dr. Demento T-shirt and tube top are nature’s timestamps (well, tube tops are always in style in my family) and the girls doing handstands in the background are interesting points for identification conjecturing. The banana-seat bicycle ices the cake.
Here’s one in which people went to the trouble to pose next to a car, but inexplicably the shot is framed to include a water hose and a tar-papered shack. 40-ish years later, though it’s the shack project and half a car that make the picture worthy of discussion.
Cars seem to be the single best way to date a photo and identify the people. Our family is blessed to have a car or wagon in almost every photo. As much as I like cars and pictures of cars, I’m pretty vigilant about keeping them out of the backgrounds of family snaps. Or I have been until now.

It’s occurred to me before that one of the things we’ll be missing in future is shoe boxes full of photos that weren’t good enough to make it into a frame but weren’t bad enough to throw away. Here‘s my favorite-ever picture of Pappy: backfocused beyond repair, I’m afraid it would never make it to print today. A new find I like for all the wrong reasons is this compositional train wreck.

I plan to try to pay some attention to the criterion “potential future interestingness” in my picture selection process from now on. I wish you would too.~