Well, now it's me who's laughing, because in a concentrated burst of activity during August and September (before and after our trip to Paris), I have -- a mere seventeen years after the actual trip -- albumised the photographs from our fortnight's tour of Ireland in August 1993. It was a daunting stack: the product of three cameras (mine, the Wugster's, Maureen's), which was perhaps why I'd sidelined it for so long, but once I started looking through it to eliminate the duplicates, the duds and the plain unuseable, it quickly became much more manageable. It was also evident how some of the colour values had faded with time, depending on the paper used -- those photographs printed on Agfa papers had held up well, but those printed using Konica seemed to have become rather darker and in almost all of the photographs taken on the walk through the woods from the Lower to the Upper Lake at Glendalough, printed on Konica paper, the greens had turned to black and the pictures therefore had to be binned. (Bummer.) Judging the colours in other batches of photographs wasn't helped by the fact that for much of the fortnight we were there the weather was overcast and grey -- for which the human eye compensates but pre-digital cameras couldn't -- and there were only three days which could have been described as at all sunny. (In some cases -- Croagh Patrick was one -- I replaced the pictures I took with actual postcard views, on the grounds that one could see more detail in the latter than provided by the grey-on-grey 35mm print.) Anyway, I now have two thick photo albums of the Ireland trip, including the impedimenta with which the pictures may be contextualised (maps, tickets, invoices, leaflets, instructive captions, etc.), and attach below the two photographs I have e-mailed Maureen as proof of my industry.
Of course, this leaves one or two other photographic records still to be albumised -- Andalucia, Madrid and Catalonia from 1998, 1999 and 2004; Pompeii and Herculaneum from 2001; Provence and the Loire Valley from last year; and oh, look, Australia's Red Centre and the Barrier Reef from 2006. (Not to mention, hem hum, Purbeck and Hadrian's Wall.) Quite a lot, in other words. But last weekend I went through to Wood Green for an afternoon's shopping with the Wugster and bought up W H Smith's and Boots's entire stock of expanding photo albums and photo leaf refills, and as soon as we get back from the trip to Edinburgh with the Truepeople in the first week of October I'll be getting stuck in once again.
