“A picture is worth a thousand words.”
We’ve made that statement many times and have often tried to accompany our writings with pictures, although formats sometimes prohibit it. Everybody always looks at pictures, whether they ever read a word of a story. Of course, horse photographs are our favorite, and we can spend hours looking at horse and rodeo pictures.
Our office walls are filled with horse photographs, and they are all our own horses.
Albums overflow with more than five decades of photographs, but they’re far from complete. Many great photo opportunities were missed and forever lost. Pride is taken in 30 scrapbooks we’ve compiled from annual horse field days and sales.
Photographer became part of our professional title when we accepted our first real job, but we never really were very good at taking pictures. That new camera they gave us with all of the buttons and dials to adjust took some learning, but we managed to maneuver them with sufficient mediocrity to keep our job.
What was the big chore was doing our own processing. With very little training, we were soon developing film into negatives, enlarging photographs and making black and white prints for reproduction in the newspaper. Initial thrill of accomplishment soon wore off when we did late night work in the home kitchen in order to meet press deadlines.
Color processing became the norm, and we often finagled a way to have processing done commercially so we wouldn’t have to work in that stinking, dreaded darkroom. One of the greatest inventions for photograph admirers like ourself was the digital camera.
Film is almost a thing of the past, and digital cameras that take perfect-enough pictures for us can be purchased at very low cost. One can even check picture quality and take another one if the first isn’t any good and delete the bad for nothing.
Cell phones even work as digital cameras, too. There is a cost for making prints, but pictures can also be made straight from the camera on duplicating machines or shipped around the world via internet for absolutely nothing.
There’s nothing like a photograph to tell a story or remember a family member, that favorite horse and a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It’s preservation of today for the future. Actually, it’s impossible to put the value on a photograph. We just wish we had
a whole bunch more, and they were all stored and described in well-organized albums.
Despite our fondness for photographs, we always remember Proverbs 25:11: “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.” Words can even be used like photographs as in Hosea 12:10: “I speak through the prophets to give clear picturesof the way things are.”
Yet, some words can never be replaced as in Deuteronomy 33:3: “Indeed, He loves the people; All Your holy ones are in Your hand, And they followed in Your steps; Everyone receives of Your words.”
+++ALLELUIA+++