Pictures are pretty cool

I wrote a post earlier about how pictures were overrated and can't always take the place of words. I didn't want to admit it then because I thought it would take away from my argument in defense of words, but pictures alone can be pretty righteous too. I think that while a picture can capture the emotion of an event, it can't be fully understood what is happening unless there are words accompanying it. Some pictures don't need words though, which is something I hesitated to acknowledge in the earlier post. I guess they each can stand alone without the other, but they also complement each other very nicely. For instance, I saw a crow bathing itself in a big puddle today. The picture alone would've been pretty cool if I had a camera with me, but the fact that the puddle was due to intense rains and some vicious flooding makes the image even cooler, at least for me.

I think that getting the camera for the girlfriend and helping her learn how to use it and taking pictures with it with her have made me appreciate and think about things as pictures more than I previously did or would allow myself to. I'm excited to have money in the summer and be able to buy my own camera. At the moment I'm thinking either a Nikon N80 or a Nikon FM10. I got the N80 for the girlfriend and have an ebook guide thing for it saved on my computer, so getting that would make sense because it's a bit cheaper and I already have a guide, but the FM10 is tempting too. I guess I'll worry about it more when the summer comes along, until then I barely have enough money to take my lady to dinner more than once. She's a real cool girl. I think that the camera has helped us see more creative sides of each other than we normally would have. She likes taking pictures of people (mostly me), while I take more pictures of things or of the few animals we see on campus. I'm not sure what that means about us, if it means anything at all.