The future beckons for mediaSmith in Westcliffe, Colo., where we have purchased our new “La Hacienda de Smith.” As we transition from living at 8 feet above sea level to 8,000 feet, I’ve been making pictures in and around the amazing Wet Valley that will be our new stomping grounds. Please take a peek at my pictures of life among the high peaks by clicking here or on the thumbnail at left. And if you’d like to help us on our way, please point anyone you know who’s interested in waterfront living to 33pineview.com, which must sell before we can finally move.

– greg

With just one week ’til Christmas, Papa Smith posed
the question of whether this year’s card was hosed.

Each child was nestled in a new situation.
several miles distant from their old Pa’s location.

If that couldn’t scuttle a Christmas-card shoot,
his subjects had largely aged out of “cute.”

So what to depict? It challenged his mind.
Should it be the new dog or his real estate find?

How ’bout a bird fishing on a May River morn?
He continues his paddles, but his choices were torn.

Then he figured a scene from the Lowcountry’s fall,
would likely please most folks, perhaps even all.

And keeping on the Smiths’ home this year’s visual focus,
seemed appropriate as they weigh changes in locus.

The boys live nearby and Cooper loves Charleston;
While their parents are looking to go Coloradan.

That move is years off, involving whether and if,
but they’ve bought 5 sunny acres, near the town of Westcliffe.

For now, Janet edits at the same Island Packet,
And Greg plies several facets of the visual racket.

Nonnie’s next door, and there’s a new dog around:
Miss Pepper’s already a well-traveled hound.

So the invite still stands, despite a changing report:
Please come visit soon at the Smith’s Last Resort.

Still, because I can slip in and out easily, spiriting albums full of lovingly organized pictures, I’ve been tricked into preparing images for a slide show my niece and nephew want to produce. Big surprises – such as secret parties – are not what my mother wants or needs. She knows this bash is coming. But a little surprise, such as our slide show, should be cool and not shocking.

Along the way, I’ve learned several things:

1. Looking at old family pictures can be a melancholy exercise. There’s Dad, joking and lively, but it’s been 29 years since he succumbed to cancer at age 66. There’s my oldest brother, always just a step from trouble, cute, with teeth. And my mother, the prettiest girl at a table filled with uniformed young men and their dates during World War II; standing with my father on a chilly afternoon at the Maryland Hunt Cup in 1955; with her famous dachshund, Skippy, gone now for more than 50 years; as a little girl with my uncle, who tormented her and whom she wants somehow to travel and see before they both pass on.

2. Group shots really matter. Posed or candid, relationships are revealed, long-past events recorded. Whatever you do with your camera, take more group shots.

3. I’m reminded that scanning, cropping, toning, etc., are work, akin to my darkroom living of the past. We captured the first 100 images with my camera on a copy stand. It’s a good production method, but it’s a damned nuisance with pictures of multiple sizes. I’ve decided scanning is a tad easier, with no worries about controlling stray reflections and holding the images flat. It’s also easier to walk away from and return, with less equipment to set up.

4. It’s not just the job. It’s the “paperwork” to document it. This is true with every project by every variety of documentary photographer. But when it comes to images fading from memory to history, it’s doubly true. Captions and other metadata are vital. What I do today could be incredibly valuable – or infinitely frustrating – for Smiths of the future. The specter of a trunk full of unlabeled photographs (which one of my cousins is contemplating in Baltimore) looms over every word I type.

5. God bless my mother for so much. But especially today for carefully pasting corners and pictures into archival albums, labeling, however cryptically, most pages with key dates and caption info.

6. Archival materials matter and colors fade. Black-and-white, which used to comprise 80 percent of my work and now accounts for less than 1 percent, is wonderful, and silver prints surely do resist fading. I hope my current “archival” digital ink prints last nearly as well.

7. Speaking of archival, “Magic” stick albums suck – for preserving images, for removing them for scanning or whatever, for reuse. And there’s nothing magical about old glue adhered to the back of 30-year-old pictures.

8. Potentially depressing as it is, the act of traveling one’s visual past is somehow uplifting – satisfying and unsettling at once. Time travel, as science fiction suggests, would likely be the same, including the similar dangers and joys, only magnified.

Click on this picture to learn more and view a trailer.

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Please click on this thumbnail to view a gallery of pictures.