The Last (and Best?) of the Cruise Pictures

It may not surprise you to learn that I took no fewer than *six* image recording devices with us on vacation. "Hey," I figured, "When's the next time we'll be visiting the Caribbean?"

(All my mental asides are in a freewheeling, slangy, gosh-I-wonder vernacular.)

In order of sophistication, there were:
- the cell phone cameras (mine and Lope's)
- the disposable waterproof camera
- the built-in iSight on my laptop
- the little Fuji digital point-and-shoot we just got, and
- the Canon Digital Rebel XT -- the big rig
- and that's not counting our eyeballs

And we certainly managed to get some good shots with all that stuff. My favorites, though, I've decided were ones that would be at the very bottom of the list -- single frames from the mini-movies taken with the Fuji.

Most pocket digital cameras can also take movies; yours almost certainly is capable, but I find that most people don't make use of that feature. And I can see why: the video is grainy, the sound is terrible, a gust of wind overloads the microphone, and your footage (pixelage?) ends up looking so twitchy (on account of the camera being so small) that it's hard to watch them without throwing up.

Still.

I take a lot of these crappy movies, mostly to remind myself later how a certain place or event "felt," which I often miss with my stills, and partially so I can do something even *fewer* people probably do than even shooting mini-movies in the first place.

Once I get it onto the computer, I scroll through the video and look for individual frames -- little frozen squares of time -- that I may have missed while I was there.

I love these frames. You get 30 of them a second, so it's not uncommon to see a strange, surprising alignment of objects inside the square, right in the middle of a fairly everyday maneuver. Beautiful little compositions, tucked away in plain sight. I like that.

And I like picking them, too. If you get a chance, try it next time you're out and about, and see if you don't enjoy sifting through your ten-second clumps of images, trying to find the one that sparkles.