The Photos Made Me Do It

Some photos from the birthday party of my grandniece Emerson who just turned 1. Emerson is the one with the bow on top in most of her photos. Emerson's older sister is Charley, dressed as Snow White but insisting that she is Sleeping Beauty (or do I have that backwards). And the last two photos include one of Mother and another of my niece Erica helping Emerson eat cake--it really wasn't as messy as anticipated.

Yesterday's post said today's post was going to be a movie review. That will have to wait and it's the photos to blame. It's 10:35 pm and I've just finished editing the football photos. They are now being uploaded to Smugmug and that will take a while with my slow DSL Lite internet connection. I only went out one time today and that was to help Mother with a small task. Otherwise, it has been a day of sitting at the computer. Mostly it was editing photos, but then come the little things like finding and emailing some photos for the Millsaps student newspaper. Helping make a contact between a parent who took football photos Saturday and has posted them on the internet, and a parent who knows how to the get the info about the photos to the other parents. There's always little stuff that adds up to a substantial time commitment.

My Smugmug uploading still has 230 of 345 photos to go. That 345 photos that I ended up with from Saturday comes from almost 1,200 photos taken. It was a night game which means a shutter speed that's too slow for action photos and a lens that doesn't reach enough to cover much of the field. I knew before the game that the majority of my photos wouldn't be good enough to keep. The problem I'll have in the future is when taking 1,200 photos at a day game and then having about 900 good photos. There's no way I can keep that many per game, but it's so hard for me to delete a decent photo. That photo is important to someone and I need to get it to that person--this is the attitude that gets me in trouble.

Speaking of trouble--this is a segue to a new topic--today is the day President Obama speaks to the school children. I've been very disappointed in the majority of the news coverage concerning this controversy. The uproar hasn't been about the fact that the President is addressing the school children, it has been about the study guide or talking points that were sent to the school teachers about things to discuss with the children after the President's speech.

That's the key issue and the focal point of the debate, and yet this AP Story about the controversy doesn't mention the study guide until the last few paragraphs and even then it doesn't report on the original text of the handout. It's sloppy journalism. Maybe intentional, maybe not--either way there's no excuse for it.

On the other hand, credit should be give to those who did present the story in a correct manner. Here's a story from the Washington Times that presents the facts and it allows the reader to decide if they think there's something to all this hubbub or if it is much ado about nothing. That's what we should get from the media in this country, a fair presentation of both sides of each issue and then the public can make up their own mind. I'm afraid that those days of journalism are in the past, assuming that they ever really existed at all.

It's 11:15 and still have 30 photos waiting to download. The loader also says there have been 18 errors. I don't want to go through all of the photos trying to figure out which didn't download. Like I said, it's the little tasks that pop up that eat up so much time. The good news it that the fall sports will be over in another 10-12 weeks--is it too early to be starting that sort of countdown?