86GTS wrote:

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After all four of our parents passed away, like many others we were left to sort out their belongings after they died.

Both of our parents were keen caravaners & had traveled extensively throughout Australia. Great!

We inherited hundreds of hours of video footage & thousands of 35mm slide photographs that they had taken along their way.

We tried to make an effort to watch/see as much of them as possible.

Obviously they meant far more to them than us.

We found them totally boring despite all of the exciting places that they had been.

This got us thinking about whether it was worth recording all of OUR travels because they won't mean anything to our children when we pass away.

Also, we are too busy traveling & creating memories along the way to be looking back at what we have done.

We came to the conclusion that it seems like a waste of time taking too many images & thought it was better to recall our travels from memory while we still have one.

Happy travel memories mean a lot to those that shared them but virtually nothing to those that didn't.

What do others think?

 

 

 

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 I agree.    If you want to ,take a few (just a few)  Pics. - easy now with phones and Pics can have Date and Location automatically -  to keep the memories alive for yourself during the following few years but be aware that generally anyone else is soon bored/not interested in  looking at them . Just enjoy the travel without being tied to "record keeping" ....  KB

All my bike touring trips, except for maybe 35 pics of 35mm film, I have taken on these trips since 2016, my third stint back at bicycletouring, that is all the photo's I have taken, mostly of wildlife, my dog, and my camping set up. My wife is not into seeing them, nor my daughter, only the grandkids. I have 14 X 35 mm rolls of film that we took on our big tour in the 80's that have not been developed. They are in a temperature controlled secure storage, but after our other slides and photos were taken early on that same trip and nobody wanted to view, them just didn't see the point to develop them. Don't see the point today for videos or pics anymore. I do video from behind me on a GoPro lookalike, but the is for accident reasons, and it is mostly over written. I have the memories of my trips, that is until I lose my memory in old age, then it wont matter.

We have never attempted a blog, but did for a number of years produce an annual CD of our travels. It was clearly eagerly anticipated by friends, but no more.
I have though, kept a cronological digital pictorial record of our travels for many years, from our honeymoon in 1967 (and even before that) and on and that is useful to provide information about experiences and conditions that we still enjoy and that we can share with others, when appropriate.
I find that these pics are useless if not digitised.

Refueling on the way to Darwin, 1967.

Cheers,
Peter

Unfortunately not too many of the modern generation are not interested in history, even their family's history.
Pat has notebooks that belonged to her passed grand parents, great grand parents who were engineers, surveyors of Newcastle, etc. We'll make them available to some museums as what is written is quite important to history. For those who live in Newcastle, the main street is named after her family member who surveyed the city.

A couple of years ago however, she convinced me to throw out a lot of my Darwin, Radio Australia, & Ceduna slides - now I regret it as there are some great ex PMG, Telecom, Telstra staff Facebook pages where they could have been shown to other prior & later workmates.

Pat also has hand written letters of her earlier family's travels through life, travelling by ship from England to Australia, going through both world wars, being sunk by enemy action - now we send emails which last 10mS, a day, a week or a year & once deleted - it's gone!

In 1999 we travelled extensively through Egypt. It is a photographers dream and took about 300 slides on film back then. When we returned home nobody was really interested and the process of watching them became a chore for all concerned. It also occured to me that I had only seen most of these fantastic sights thrue the camera lens and mostly missed the real atmosphere as I was to busy with camera setting etc "they wern't auto then" So my opinion is use your eyes and brain to capture the moment or you will miss a lot takeing photo's . Photo's never do landscapes justice anyway in my opinion

I used to be a fulltime photographer. One trip to Africa, I took 68 000 photos. Took me ages to go thru them and sort out. I sold a few but thats it. I've kept about 200 really good ones and I just set them as my screen saver. I also used to be a motorsport track photographer and other than the participants who bought some photos, no one is interested Re travel photos, NO ONE IS INTERESTED except you! They are good to review sometime later but thats it. Its just like slide nights where people were forced to watch someone elses photos of a trip they did. I remember one such night where they showed hundreds of photos of their cats FFS. Most people would prefer poking red hot knitting needles into their eyes than look thru YOUR travel photos, they are just for you

Despite being a keen photographer (use to develop my own) I take very few photographs these days and rarely look at old pics. However I do take the odd bit of video which is usually posted to my website.

As for looking at other people's pics: I am usually prepared to *provided* they give me the photographs/iPad/controller so I can view them at my own speed.

Why do people showing you a pic feel the need to also provide a ten minute verbal description of something you've never seen, never will see and have little to no interest in? But if I've already moved on five pics they can't easily do that :)

I remember back to days when I would dread going to some peoples homes after they had been away on a trip because the photo albums would come out. Once the recent travels were done, it would move onto other travel , their family and anything else they were interested in. So I think photos are really only for your own benefit, and nobody else will be interested.

I save my travel (and other) photos to PC and remove duplications, those lacking interest, or poor quality. Then pass what is left through Lightroom, improving any that need it. Then they get filed away logically.

Maybe once every couple of years I run an automated slideshow on the TV. My partner can't keep her eyes off the screen as memories keep flooding back. My daugters and their families have zero interest. It would have to be of something like an alien spaceship landing. I think part of the reason is the flood of amazing images that appear on the internet every day. In comparison a photo of a view or a historical monument, a mountain or even your grinning facade doesn't mean much.

I think if you were there, you will like to have those memories refreshed, but not otherwise. And certainly not seeing them regularly like as a screensaver.

There is also a rapidly growing trend for photos to be "enhanced" with unnaturally rich colours. I hate that effect, but I see multitudes of glowing comments on social media about photos that look ridiculous to me. Times change.

DMaxer wrote:

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Even worse Mike, is when one of these photos of some place you had no intention of going to or any interest in contains a person they met on their travels. You are then given the life story of someone you don't know and will never meet.

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Should be a capital offence.

I once had a friend who was a real sci-fi nut and would, at considerable length, tell a group sitting around a campfire, in great detail, his interpretation of some crap sci-fi novel he had recently read!

Also, I recall one female partner who was rather taken aback when, early in our relationship, one morning at breakfast as she began to tell me about the dream she had last night and I put up my hand and said; "Stop! I have no interest whatsoever in the ramblings of your unconscious mind." No more dream stories after that :)

My wife's parents lived in a war service home in a war service area near an army camp.
Their whole life revolved around war memories & the nearby RSL.
They did a trip up & down the Stuart Hwy, calling in at every WW2 site/monument.
My father-in-law didn't see any action in the war but he did spend a lot of time on supply conyoys from Adelaide to Darwin.
He had the time of his life shooting Roos & Bustards roasting them in the campfire.
He also participated in lots of other larrakin stunts, almost every day.
We spent around 5 hours watching reel to reel footage of his Stuart Hwy trip with his commentary about each site & what he had done there during the war.
As we sat there riveted to the screen he plied us with a flagon of cheap port.
I ended up nodding off, it was so boring!
Good on him though, they were his memories & he was a great bloke.

When I was just a little kid, back in the fifties, our local church would have a fund raiser night in the church hall which consisted of a few cartoons for the kids before settling back into a couple of hours of slides delivered by one of the local bores. The kids would sit down the front, behind them would be the mothers and up the back, well out of sight would be the dads having a few beers. The cartoons were generally Woody Woodpecker ,Mickey Mouse and maybe Bugs Bunny. The slides would consist of someone's holiday together with droning commentary and hopeless attempts at humour. I think the lowest point was when the holiday slides came to an end and the town bore then gave us all about 30 minutes worth of slides of gardens and flowers he had seen in his travels. Anyway, we were on about slide ten of stinking rogers or some other flower from every angle when the projector blew up and started smoking. All the kids and probably most of the adults, thought it was hilarious. When we got home I was telling my dad (who refused to go anywhere near these fundraisers) about what had happened and he looked at my mum and said "church hall, yes, even the good lord couldn't put up with that crap".

 

We regularly change our laptop & home computer screen images from our travels over many years, but capturing images of places that we've been to as sort of proof that we've actually been there seems a little pointless these days.

-- Edited by 86GTS on Monday 7th of February 2022 04:21:43 AM