A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
1 September 2023
When school resumed the last week of August we were marching up and down the aisles at El Big Box store looking for nothing more exotic than shims. When you can escape a place like that with only $2 less in your pocket, you deserve a MacArthur Fellowship.
But before we found the $2 shims (which were right by the entrance, of course), we had wandered through two floors of products, countless aisles and the bathroom.
Along the way, we were struck dumb by a large display of Halloween decorations.
Back to school and Halloween ghouls. Coincidence?
Probably depends on how old you are. If you're school age, it's no coincidence.
But since it was still August, it was premature, even for American Consumerism which can't help Celebrate the Next Holiday Well in Advance. What are you going to do with that stuff for two months?
Apparently no shoppers had an answer to that. No one was buying.
But, desperate for a Friday Slide Show, we whipped out our trusy iPhone 6 Plus and snapped a few shots. There were some El Big Box employees around but they couldn't be bothered by our espionage.
It was just a phone after all.
Later, our fun done, we exhaled in relief. We had our slide show. You have our slide show.
But all of a sudden we realized we had our Olympus E-PL1 with us at the time and could just as easily have made real photographs.
Of course that would have made us more terrifying than the ghouls we were photographing. And, having been through school, we were too smart for that.