In which we think about photography and Catholics

All right. We’re back. The party’s over. So it goes.

I’ll talk about the trip a bit as we go along, but not in much detail yet. I’m still working my way through my photographs. I have to admit that this is a way different process than it used to be when I got my first real camera. Back then there was this thing called film. If you went on a long trip, you brought a bag of the stuff with you, because the first rule of photography is to take a lot of shots and the second rule of photography is to throw away the bad ones. Look at a proof sheet of any professional photographer. Most of the shots are discards. That’s the way photography works. And back then, in the film days, the reason photography was expensive. You had to buy the film, then you had to get it processed. I used to do my own b&w darkroom stuff, but never tried color. Making prints was expensive. Even just getting contact sheets to decide which shots to print was expensive. Now I just throw the biggest SD disk I can find into the camera and shoot away. You gotta love the modern age!

Speaking of which, we did see a Julia Margaret Cameron exhibit while we were traveling, a body of work from back in the days before strip film. One is as amazed by the process, which is much more like painting than what we think of as photography. That would apply to a lot of photographic artists, like the ones using plates (think Ansel Adams, for example) well into the 20th century. Some still do. Funny people, artists.

Anyhow, one is back. And things are happening. From afar, I got to watch everyone on Facebook get ready for CatNats, then go to CatNats, then nothing because everyone was busy actually doing CatNats, then suddenly a barrage of “I’m so proud of our team, the Mudville Magpies, reaching round 5 of PF without a single internal hemorrhage” on postings sent from the airport as everyone set off for home. Sigh. As I’ve often said, CatNats is one of my favorite tournaments, in many ways despite itself. Go figure. I’m glad that they got off another good one. (Speaking of PF, a couple of local boys did in fact take that one, after dominating since they first crawled out of the cabbage patch. Nice.) I guess the next and last thing that will happen is NatNats, or Non-Catholic Nationals, or whatever it is they call themselves nowadays. No soft spot in my head heart for that one, however, having never been.

Onward.