1000 words

If you’ve been paying attention at all, it’s rather obvious that I like to take pictures. When I go caching, I like to take my camera along. I don’t necessarily use it all the time, but I like to have it just in case. Sometimes, I get burned, when I’ve seen something especially cool, but don’t have the camera. I’ve even lamented about not having the camera along in a couple of logs.

As noted in another post, I’ll use my camera to cause a distraction in case muggles are paying close attention to me. But even though I’m using it as a distraction, I’m always thinking about how the picture could be used in the log that I’ll write about the cache find. Sometimes, the picture itself, will help tell the story of the cache find, and other times, the picture is there just because of something I saw, that I might not mention in the story, but thought it might make a nice looking shot.

When I first started caching, I had a 35mm camera so I most of the time I would only take the camera along when I knew I was going to end a roll of film and get them developed quickly after that. Then I had to scan the pictures and then upload them. I have a grand total of 5 pictures in my caching gallery that are pre-digital. Since going digital in late 2002, I have taken quite a few pictures. Some, as I looked through the gallery in anticipation of this article, made me think, whatdafuh was I thinking when I took that picture? Others, I’ve gotten lucky to be in the right place at the right time and others I’ve worked exceedingly hard to get the right shot. It’s probably like that with any photographer.

I’d wanted to go digital for awhile before actually getting my first digital camera, but I know one of the reasons I finally made the plunge was locationless caches. Locationless, or reverse caches are those caches where you had to find something, a specific object somewhere in the world, and then log it on the cache page. Geocaching.com relates it to a scavenger hunt and has since discontinued them, moving them over to Waymarking.com. Locationless caches usually involved taking a picture and uploading it with your log. Without a digital camera, it would be very hard to log a locationless cache, so that sort of pushed me over the edge into the digital camp. I now have almost 600 pictures taken digitally that I’ve posted in many of my logs.

Pictures enhance logs, in my opinion. It would probably be possible to take a picture at every cache you found, but that might prove to be impractical, unless you wanted to post spoiler pictures for every lamppost cache that you found. I’m sure cache owners wouldn’t be too pleased with that. I found when I take pictures, there are some times that I just hit delete when I get home. I took a lot of pictures on my road trip and when I got home and looked at some of them, I thought to myself, Eh, that one really doesn’t need to be posted. So it got deleted. And that’s ok. As I noted above, I really should have deleted some of the ones that I actually did post.

Sometimes when I take pictures on caching trips, it’s for the historical nature of the area. Most of the photos on the road trip fell into this category. Other times, the flora and fauna are just too spectacular to pass up. I’ll see some flowers and then get on a roll and it seems like that’s all I have are flowers. Other times it will seem like all I have are little scurrying creatures of some sort. Sometimes the pictures bring a bit of whimsy to my life and so I want to share them with others who read the logs. And of course, many pictures help tell the story.

A picture really is worth a 1000 words. Right now I’m averaging 114 words per log according to INATN. I can’t imagine how long my logs would be if I hadn’t brought my camera along for the ride.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocaches:

Hofert's Walls #1 - by bookishblondie and LegoIan
Carpe Diem! - by HaZzMaTt
Bridge of Sighs - by TRUROKR
Walk of Fame - by Dru Morgan
A Slanted View with a Gentle Breeze - by TheDeviousMaxPower