Outdoor Odysseys

Sometimes, it is difficult to pick the pictures

There is something that has come home to me while writing recent trip reports. The biggest has not been extricating sufficient details from my memory, though that can be a problem at times. It is picking the accompanying photos from the collection that has accumulated. This especially is an issue when I am away for a few days, like my trips to Ireland throughout 2022 and 2023.

What happens is that I come away with so many of them. Though photography should be more deliberate, the desire to come away with at least a few that work means that I often cannot help myself. This can intrude on being completely present in a moment if one is not careful, and such is our acquisitiveness that our better reasoning can be overwhelmed when in the midst of natural beauty enhanced by the right kind of light. Emotions often override, and perhaps cloud, our conscious thinking.

In one way, a collection of photos showing every part of a hike can act as a partial video that prompts our minds to extract details that otherwise would not reappear. It is when there is an insufficient number that jogging the memory becomes less effective. What is novel will persist more than what is commonplace and uneventful, as I have found in recent months. The emotional response and even a painful recollection sends us back to a particular moment. Without these, narratives can be challenging to construct.

When I started writing these trip reports, they were generally timely, so summon all the details to compile an account was straightforward. Any limitation on the supply of photos was no difficulty, either. Just one or two would brighten an account. Film photography persisted as my main medium perhaps too long, as I have found when reviewing my online photo albums. The associated cost also cut down the number of photos, which helped when editing. Because processing those photos also was slower, I got into digital photography to have some visual accompaniment for the text. Motivations differed in those days.

Now, I often end up with photos that are so similar in quality that I struggle to work out which one not to use. That can add to the number included with a trip report, and perhaps reflects what has happened with technology. However, there is no need to make things too like video editing. Thus, a rethink is needed. However, those emotions can muddy things on the trail and I land in the same dilemma all the while, even if it is better to have the ability to choose instead of not having anything at all.