current technology

After I wrote yesterday's post, I sat thinking about how nice it is to be able to make my pictures better after the shutter has snapped back into place.

It's the same, of course, with a word-processor. In the olden times, actually producing the paper copy of your document was a (VERY) laborious and tiresome ordeal. It could take hours (and hours and hours, depending on the length of the item), it was annoying (remember the days before wite-out?), it was ... primitive.

I remember learning that I *dared* not mess with anything as I typed out my final copy. That any "improvements" I made would inevitably mess up something two or three paragraphs down.

Instead of spending our papers' final hours polishing and refining our writing, we spent those hours mindlessly pounding out hardcopy.

It makes me shudder, just thinking about it.

So much more sensible now, to begin with the writing in the computer, to spend the hours one spends on a paper on the *writing*, and let machines whip out the paper copy, essentially instantly.

Of course, with writing and photography, the end product benefits when the original material is interesting. Isn't it excellent, now, how much easier it is to polish up that original material into something that is significantly better than it started.


You'll recall me talking about how terrific the Toledo Zoo is. Yesterday my DH got the radical idea that we should make a spontaneous trip to the zoo. So we did. I got some really good pictures (did I say that I love my camera?????). This isn't one of the best, but it is a hippo, and since I was talking about the hippos before, I'll start with this..... The thing you can't see from this pic is that we were within 6-8 feet of this girl (with some *serious* plexiglass between).