"But what is life without documentation?!"

[Cyclefrance]

Adding to the 'minutae' element...

I'm not the greatest photographer - my pictures seldom record what I am looking at (hope you know what I mean - it looks a great shot through the viewfinder, but then, somehow, the result turns out to be rather flat). On top of that I always come back from my trips thinking 'why didn't I take a picture then - that would have been really good to have been able to include that'. So I seem to miss out on a lot of events that I should have recorded.

The plus side?

Well, I have discovered more and more with digital photography, that a seemingly poor shot cannot help but contain some interesting elements (minutae), and the beauty of the digital world is that you can extract these parts, but ignore the rest. So, for example, a glistening section of a picture depicting the gilded gates to Versailles can be lifted from an otherwise bland picture of the overall frontage - and then presented in all its glory, elsewise lost to the passing eye.

The funny thing is that I never see these minutae until after the event. So there's generally a number of pleasant surprises presented when I get round to viewing my pictures on an enlarged scale for the first time. The minutae of life are so often concealed at first - how nice it is to be able to unmask them so easily and readily nowadays - something that would have been a pretty involved task to achive pre-digital photography.

I have a picture from the Paris trip that shows us all sitting outside a cafe in a place called Rue. I was going to show it as a whole. And then my eye fell upon the actual glasses of beer, in various stages of consumption and nicely catching the light of the sun. Just showing these tells a story in itself - probably more so than the the bigger picture of the 4 blokes sitting on chairs outside the cafe - the beers are lost in this larger picture and therefore so is their significance.