Mon 16 Apr 2007
You can collect a whole lot of photos over a lifetime, especially if you
document damn near every hunting trip you take in 50 years. All my life
my granndpa was a hunter in every sense. Elk, moose, deer, turkey,
crane, swan, pheasant, grouse, duck, and probably a few other things.
Even better, he cooked all the game himself and made the tastiest
vittles around. The freezer was constantly stocked with frozen dead
things. And that was after he gave some to whoever let him use the land,
to the butcher, and to friends. In later years I found out he also had 2
meat lockers in town.
Over half of the photos, over thousands of them, of my grandparents’
life was of him mugging with his conquests. With that body of evidence I
can draw some conclusions about what he was good at:
– Hunting
– Grinning
– Standing over dead things
– Putting dead things on cars
– Holding up dead things by their neck
– Getting his grandson’s to hold up dead things by their neck.
I’ve also drawn some conclusions about things his photographers were by
and large not so good at:
– Composition
– Focus
– Exposure
– Knowing the position of their thumb relative to the lens