15,790. And shrinking.

What is 15,790?  Why, the number of digital photos on our laptop's hard drive, of course.  That's 28.8 gigabytes of pixelly goodness, or over one third of this old Macbook's available storage space.  It's hard to believe that 80 GB was more memory than we could use when we bought this thing five years ago- now I feel like we've got the computer equivalent of the house with twelve cats and rooms full of stacks of old newspapers. It doesn't help matters much that the hard drive is now making a sound that sounds like a mix between an 1956 Vespa scooter in dire need of a tuneup, a foot-powered dentist drill, and, well, a MacBook hard drive that may fail at any minute.



Or maybe that will get better once I install the latest two direly needed software updates.  I've heard that can sometimes be the case.  (Please be the case, please be the case...)  Oh, but I need more space on my hard drive to install said updates, so back to the 15,970 photos that I'm in the process of weeding out.  I mean, Lordy, 15,970 photos?? I don't know why anyone in their right mind would have more than 13, 476...



This all just to say that several forces in the universe, chiefly being my need to delete a couple of thousand photos or so (don't worry, they're backed up onto the external drive), but also including the fact that my camera is in the United States right now, have conspired to send me back in time to re-examine the far distant past of 2010.  And wow, nothing like a year or so gone by to give you a fresh eye on your photos.  And Jane's photos, I might add.  The picture at the top of the post is hers, as is the one below, and several more on the way.



So yeah, I've been cropping like a Banshee, and sending all the results to Flickr.  Which is why you may see a few more things that are out of sequence coming up, but, you're not expecting chronology from me anyway, right?

Oh, and yes, you heard correctly:  Banshees crop their photographs.  All the time.  It's what they do when they're not screaming.

Henri Cartier-Bresson?  Not a Banshee.