Error of Parallax

People always told me that all the pictures that I took would be valuable, in time.
When the characters were old or dead, the pictures would be a  link to the past.

Having taken lots of pictures myself and preserved many more, I have come to realise the value of old pictures, and I now understand why that they are a window into a world that doesn't exist anymore.

The interesting thing about the old pictures is that they all suffer from the error of parallax.

Some pictures literally have the heads chopped off.

Cheap cameras back in the day had a separate viewfinder and the main lens through which it took pictures. They often had a slightly different perspective; So unless you learnt to compensate, for the shift, you ended up cutting off heads.

To make things worse you had to develop and print before you discovered your "boo-boos". (anybody remember the booboo bin?)

This process took a week or even two, and only then did you get to see the results.

By that time you couldn't remember if you framed the picture exactly centre, or compensated a little to allow for a shift of perspective.

Irritating as this was, this was not the real issue.

The true error of parallax is that you have this portal to a different world, but you are unable to move the view around. All you see is the glimpse given to you by the photographer.

If only you could pan around, really take a look around and experience what that moment, frozen in time, really meant.

That newspaper on the table.

Wouldn't you like to read the headlines, see the yard out that window in the corner of the picture?

Hear the photographer as he chided the subjects as they lined up.

Smell the cooking and the smoke of the coal stove.

All we are able to do is use the pictures and our imperfect memories to relive that special moment. Sometimes we can, but mostly we settle for a snippet of how things were, before wrinkles, and baldness, and big bellies.

The past always has a special kind of nostalgia associated with it.

A flavour of time lost, and opportunities missed.

Wrong turns and a sense of loss.