Good reads

nthm
- Contains those portfolios that provide the most integrated combination of pictures and narrative text.

Wishful thinking has for many years kept me chasing the elusive goal of combining words and pictures in a way that mimics the story-reading experience of books. This has resulted in a collection of written diary/notebooks, a few sketchbooks with interspersed notes, several decades worth of photo albums with an after-the-fact attempt to add names, dates and places, and finally with a computerised system capable of assimilating both notes and digital pictures.

Even this last has never quite become the fully integrated scheme of my dreams. Note-taking, diary writing, and photography are, for me, different sorts of activity, usually carried out in somewhat different moods or contexts. Note-taking seems most effective in a reflective, after-hours context, while taking pictures is something I'm inclined to do while active and not thinking in verbal terms. Bringing both together to capture the same moment at the same time has never been easy.

It's difficult to write while you're manipulating photo equipment, equally difficult to take pictures while you hold open a notebook or sketchbook and wield pencils. There exist hybrid possibilities, such as a camera with dictation capabilities, or a digital tablet with camera capabilities. So far, I've found this kind of option either too expensive, or too clumsy for field use.

Generally, people seem happy to simply show each other current pictures and talk about them without any elaborate attempts at adding permanent documentation. Or even recording names, dates and places.

Not me, I'm afraid. Like most people, I have low patience with ODTAA. Or, ODPAA, One Damn Picture After Another, and have spent years of my life experimenting with IT systems to solve this problem. Initial attempts took the form of synchronized sound 35mm slide shows, with a spoken word voice track. These naturally required a prepared script to accompany the pictures. A few early examples follow. By converting these shows to web pages, they can now be browsed on a phone or tablet device. And this, in my opinion, comes closest to reading pictures, that is, viewing images and text together in a coherent, book-like context.

tab=links
"<)))" indicates that the show has a recorded MP4 version.
1975 Killbear and Killarney camping <)))
1981 Pukasaw Hike <)))
1983 year summary
1984 1. NFLD - St. Catharines to Cape Breton <)))
1984 2. NFLD - Western part <)))
1984 3. NFLD - Eastern part <)))
1985 Silver Anniversary Canoe Trip <)))
1988 Motor trip to BC <)))
1989 1. GB - London and Vicinity <)))
1989 2. GB - South, Midlands, Scotland <)))
1989 3. GB - Lake District <)))
1996 A Howling Wilderness (Tadoussac)
1997 Greece
1998 The Tasks of Eve <)))
2001 Kilimanjaro diary <)))
2002 With the Skyline Hikers in Alberta <)))
2004 Hawaii
2007 Algonquin Park with the NFNC <)))
2007 Lake Superior kayaking <)))
2009 South America <)))
2009 Inca Trail
2013 Hiking beyond the treeline <)))

An additional example follows of more recent attempts to provide a thinner but hopefully continuous narrative context for a diary-like series of pictures.
2013 Pelee Point and Island biking.