Sunday, December 14, 2008

A new photo but the same old profile

When I started this blog, I searched through the thousands of pictures on our home computer to find a recent photo of me alone to use as my profile picture. The only one I found was a shot taken Christmas morning a couple of years ago. When you're the photographer of the family, there aren't many pictures of you, and I had taken most of the family pictures for more than 30 years. The subjects were mostly our children and, later, our grandchildren. I showed up in a few group shots but few others. So the photo on my profile was not exactly a portrait.
When I recently saw a picture my wife had in her office, one that she had taken of me sitting in the porch swing of a cabin we had rented for a weekend getaway to the N.C. mountains, I decided to look for that picture among our thousands of prints in a closet at home and make it my profile picture. Thanks to my wife's organizational skills, it was not too difficult to find the picture among the dozens of photo albums, all arranged by date.
So that's my "new" profile photo, although it is, admittedly, a few years older than my previous profile shot. Don't assume that I chose an older photo out of vanity or to deny my age. I still wear the shirt and jeans I'm wearing in that photo, and my hair still follows approximately the same receding outline you see in this photo.
Over the years, I don't think I've ever had a professional "portrait" picture made, except for newspaper mugshots meant to run with a column logo or an announcement of some sort. I have no access to those long-forgotten pictures, so I've had to rummage through the family pictures to find a suitable picture for this blog. And when you've been behind the family camera for most of your life, it's hard to find a picture of yourself.

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