Slide Nights and Photo Days
Recent blogpost images and 2022 June blogpost pics about my trip to Greenland and Iceland
Aware that I will be finishing these weekly blogposts at the end of the year, I am reminiscing about what I have written over the past seven years. I’ve just finished compiling my Year of Sundays 2022 book and so enjoyed looking back on my solo adventures to places far north.
Reliving these most significant events has been a wonderful experience. I get to travel all over again with my archive of photos. Its like having a family slide night after our holidays when my dad would set up the projector on the kitchen table and screen the slide images onto the door of our white Kelvinator fridge.
This digital age of thousands of photos saved on your phone is both wonderful and dispiriting. I love the ease of taking instantaneous images on phones and digital cameras. The downside is so many pictures get lost and forgotten in amongst the thousands (or tens of thousands) or images you have stored on a tiny chip or in the ‘cloud’.
It does beat lugging around heavy photo albums when you move house or even finding spaces to house them all. I’ve become an absolute fan of these digital print on demand services which allows me to make books of my words and images. I can edit my more verbose blogposts (and there were many, especially when I first started writing). I thought I had to cram so much research and information into them.
Reading them now as I copy and paste them into the book layout, I am amazed at how much time I spent learning about the stories of the places I travelled to. Like writing about the book I read while in Scotland about the stealing of the Stone of Destiny, that chunk of granite that used to be under the ‘coronation chair’ in London. It was returned to Scotland and is now only ‘lent’ to England for royal coronations.
Meanwhile I get to use a really lovely photo of me in Greenland for the cover of the 2022 book. Images that never made it into a blogpost but that I found when trawling through the photos from June 2022. I can still feel the cold wind on my face and the thrill of going out into the bay on a little boat in Nuuk to look for puffins.
Or travelling north on the Greenland ferry from Nuuk to Ilulissat and waking up to icebergs at breakfast. The night cruise, still light in high summer to the face of the glacier and hearing the rumble as chunks ‘calved’ from it and fell into the water near the boat. We had to hightail it away before the rolling waves of water could capsize us.
So here’s to archiving and making photo books. I can’t bring back slide nights but I can read the book about my travels and what I felt when I was there.
