You can go to Gypsy Life , my blog about my travels, to read my biography of life so far…
As I get older I realize that over the years memories build on experiences, people you have met. Some for a short time, some become life long friends.
Family are deeply entrenched in your life and memories. The family grows over the years. Daughters and sons, marry or have partnerships.The extended family now includes in-laws. Children are born, grow and bring their special joy to be remembered. Weddings, birthdays, Christmas, special occasions, some happy, some sad.
Then, for me, a very special part of my memories involves my passion for travel.
The thread that runs through all of my memories are my photos. Thousands of them. I had a Box Brownie in the early 1950′s for my 10th birthday. Now that will date me. An Olympus SLR was my companion in the 1980′s as I travelled around the world. Photos take up room in a large cupboard, some in albums, some just in shoe boxes. All precious to me. Now with the advent of digital cameras it is a huge, largely uncatalogued, collection on the hard drive and various memory sticks.
When people are asked what they would save in a disaster, after family and pets it is nearly always the photograph collection. Sadly for many Australians who went through the natural disasters of floods, cyclones and bushfires during 2010, time and again it was the loss of a lifetime of memories in their photos that they mourn as being irreplaceable
So I am starting this blog to gather together, in no particular order, photos that bring back memories for me. Of course a lot of my photos are not digital. Nearly 50 years of prints. Maybe I can scan and reproduce them… I will try… I bought my first digital camera in 2001 at huge cost back then. So that is 11 years of digital.
I hope you, my blogging friends, will enjoy looking at these photos and sharing memories with me.
Memories are made of this 
looking forward to it…
Thanks for comments Sandra
Your photos are extraordinary. Thank you for sharing such vibrancy with the world.
Thank you
Glad I stumbled across your blog, some lovely photographs. I agree that photographs are an imortant resource and a part of our lives that we must do all we can to retain for the future generations.
Thank you for the comment. I’m pleased I have found blogging it gives me an opportunity to go through my photos again
Glad about your visit as it brought me to your blog. I love travelling myself, although for reasons many, one hasn’t been able to do as much as one would have wanted to. Yes..blogging is a wonderful forum to learn and share and get to know new friends and peek into their lives…with their permission, of course 🙂
Reading this jogged my memory. We were in Australia in 2010. I remember being in Melbourne and watching the koalas with burnt paws being rescued on the news. We had been evacuated in the San Diego fires of 1997 from our home which wasn’t harmed, but thousands of people lost everything. I remember the trauma in Australia and the terrible drought and the people trying to shelter in place. Terrible stuff.
Sorry, bad at dates. San Diego Fires were in 2007! We moved to the holler in 2008.
Your photos are beautiful, thanks for sharing !!!
Hello Rita welcome to my world, thanks for coming across and leaving a comment
What a great idea! Photos are definitely one of the first things I’d grab if a fire or other disaster threatened my house. I have uploaded some of my photos to an online backup service just in case. I often wonder what people do when they lose everything. Perhaps they could buy a collection of cards and write down memories of treasured moments.
You have a lovely blog here. I’ve awarded you the Daisy award. See here: http://write21.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/daisy-award/
Thank you Justin, it is such a compliment to be given an award. I have checked your blog and you have some very interesting and useful posts with ideas and insights for writers.
I think most people treasure their photos and having a wonderful tool like WordPress to work on and collect your photos and memories means they will survive floods, fire and tempest…
I also use Flicka to store the best of my digital photos but of course I have thousands of film photos that are either in albums or shoe boxes gradually deteriorating. My plan is to scan the best of them. I have made a start but it will be a long and time consuming job….
something you mentioned in your latest blog made me look into your ‘about’ again after some time. Like you, I used to ‘drown’ in photographs, on paper, on !!! floppies!!! and now somewhat less on CD’s. The paper ones are now either destroyed (they did not like my constant travelling/living in diff. climate zones), packed up in store in UK, or on those wretched floppies, which nobody seems to be able to transfer onto CD’s here. This has taught us a huge lesson, since we travel constantly our excess luggage from now on will be, yes! photographs!!! lol. But since Jo (my husband) has his own blog (www.manningtreearchive.com) we need so many more pictures. We are off in 3 weeks for 1 whole month to Bangkok again for Christmas etc. – and as you know, plenty to photograph there. Since laptop will come with us, I have the chance of looking into your site whilst there. Thanks for sharing your memories and photos with us.
Very interesting comment I think we all have so many old film photos slowly degrading and cannot bear to throw away. We have a huge terrabyte external harddrive and thought we were very clever putting all our photos onto it (still not got through all the albums, shoe boxes etc, don’t know if we ever will despite the best of intentions!!) but today we had an enormous fright when the external hard drive wouldn’t open and told us the file was empty. OMG I nearly died. Eventually solved the problem but have now decided to back up each batch onto smaller hard drives instead of having EVERYTHING on one.
We love Bangkok enjoy your visit, look forward to the blogs about your trip…
thanks , B. is just ‘nearby’ for us, less far than Europe!! and since we are there quite often we have friends . My heart nearly stopped when I read about your harddrive – Jo luckily had made a few copies EACH just before my last computer gave up ‘the ghost’. Care to share email?
Btw, re age – he said that once women are over 40 + they stay young foreever (ahhhh!) so, …forever 41, ok ok I will admid to 42! not more, lol.
Ok going backwards from 40 I must be round about 10 by now lol… 🙂 I’m ok about email contact…
I can relate to your feelings about photographs. My first camera was one of my most treasured belongings, even though it took such basic and poor quality photos.
I hated the process, but have scanned (and rescanned, as better scanners were made) my negatives, and my slides, most of which I kept for all that time. Now I am tagging them, to make them easier to relocate. But it is a boring job!!
I very much enjoy your blog and the concept behind it.
Welcome to my blog Madoqua I agree about the scanning of old photos it is time consuming and not always good result but at least it is going to put them into digital format to stop further deterioration. Wow tagging you sound an organised lady.
Greetings from Victoria,
Just keep on living your experiences through photography. It’s the most beautiful way to document our experiences, the stuff of memories.
God bless you
Thank you for the comment we are so lucky to live in this digital and computerised age that makes photography so easy to take and save
I’ve nominated your blog for the Sisterhood of the World Bloggers Award!, because I really love it and I think it is very nice. Feel free to accept the award. If you want to accept, here’s the link with all the information: http://praguebykaty.wordpress.com/2013/01/04/praguebykaty-blog/
Thank you Katy, it is a real honour to be acknowledged with an award. I’m so pleased to hear that you are enjoying sharing my memories
Thank you for sharing all of your memorable photos and I highly appreciate high value of our friendships. Best wishes (muhammads).
Thank you for sharing your photos and memories. I am glad I stumbled upon your blog and have bookmarked it for frequent visits.
Welcome to my world Patricia. Thank you so much for leaving a footprint in your comment so I can pop over and visit you.
See you around and hope you enjoy my ramblings 🙂
Congratulations, Pommepal!
I have nominated your blog for the Versatile Blogger Award.
Learn more about the award here.
Thank you Patricia it is a real compliment to receive that award
You deserve the recognition!
I love the idea of blogging through photos. ‘Tis true, they sometimes tell a story better than any words can. 🙂
I agree, every where I go I am looking for that special photo to tell the story, some times I capture it, some times I don’t. Thank you for taking the time to make the comment
You’re very welcome. I’ll be visiting again. Love to you, A:)ex
Thank you, best wishes from down under
Hi Photos are a great way of jogging the memory. You have some great photos. I am doing the same thing on my blog using photos to reconstruct so to speak. I hope you have had as much joy as I have had sifting through the early photos.
Yes I have found that looking through old photos (that I have not looked at for a long time) to find one for a post is a lovely way to remember places and events.
50 years of photos? OMG that’s a load full. Good thing that you can record them now in WP for your forever memories not to mention share them.
It is almost too hard for me to believe that all those years have whizzed by. I have a wardrobe at home that Jack built shelves into to store all the albums and shoe boxes full of photos. Every shelf is full….Now, of course it is the hard drive on the computer that is overflowing…
make sure that you have a back up and store it someplace or pass it on to someone that will treasure them.
Thanks for the comment, yes I do have my digital photos backed up, but as for the old ones in albums I’m afraid that is too hard a job to scan them all so I made a start on some of the children (who are now in their 50’s) but the rest will just fade away and I don’t think any one will be interested in them when we go, I think they will just be trashed…
Wise decision.
Found your website through the WordPress Photography 101 Class. So glad I did. Your photos are stunning.
G’day Johanna, nice to meet you. That 101 class was fun wasn’t it? Thank you for the lovely comment
I was drawn in by the title of the blog. It spoke to me. When I read your about page I felt a kinship. Through the years my photos have been source of joy,memories relived and curiosity. It is connection to the past for my grandkids. They would also be one of the first things I would grab… that and my camera bag.
I’ve just been over to your blog and I love your photos and your interpretation of the themes. I look forward to sharing this blog journey with you.
I’m glad I discovered you! I look forward to following along. I’m a fellow Thursday Doors participant as well 🙂
G’day Deb, nice to meet you, I’ve popped over to see your doors and will look forward to chatting with you each week.
This resonates with me. I appreciated photographs even more since recognising that I have the peculiar quirk of aphantasia: inability to “see” anything in my mind. So thank you!
That is very interesting, I cannot visualise, find it hard to paint or draw without a visual reference. I never knew it had a name!!! I don’t dream either…
Wow, hello there! My dreams are only occasionally visual. Mostly, the narrative is a kind of dark smoky shapes.