Sensibly Nonsensical

People can be forgiven for looking at the titles of some of my images and wondering if I have a mental disorder? Well, yes, several technically. But there is some method to my madness. Honest.

When you take a lot of photos and you need to find one later on, it helps if it has some unique identifiers. A distinctive name for one. Place taken. Date. Maybe some other stuff. Anyhow, that’s the bare minimum I need to be able to search for and find a file in Windows on my backup drives or on my cloud drive.

So what if you take a lot of different pictures of the same subject, like the Mayday Tree blossoms above? I have hundreds. There are only so many ways to describe a Mayday Tree in an image title. Or how many purple nurple jokes you can riff on with lilacs. That’s why some pretty random things appear in my titles. It makes it easier for me to find the image again, and, frankly, no one cares about the titles that much.

Of course this could change on the very off chance that I or my images become famous, but if it hasn’t happened yet in over half a century of slinging lenses, I’m not expecting things to change. Still, it amuses me to think of a poorly titled image like Two in the Pink on display in Calgary’s Glenbow Museum. I mean, the title is deliberately lewd.

So, yeah. Sometimes the titles are whatever randomly pops into my head and it tends to be unique because it helps make it easier to find images when searching later. Sometimes they’re a bit lewd because I’m, uh, dysfunctional.

My friend Ray and both also had an issue where if we saw something and thought of a title for it, then we’d have to take the photo of the subject that went with the title just because. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a very good photo, what matters is that it’s not acceptable to not use an image title you thought of that tickles your pickle. That would be wrong. I walked past a long dormant bush in the back alley yesterday, noticed the new blooms and thought to myself, “lilacs in da house!” Thus was born a rather mediocre image.

Now you know. Don’t you feel better?

Images made with my Helios 44m-2 58mm f2.0 lens that has the reversed front lens element. It is mounted to my Canon EOS R5 using an M42 to RF lens adapter.