Savannah, 2008

In the Venn Diagrams of real life, I sometimes have overlapping assignments or projects that allow me some increased efficiency, or, in the vernacular, to kill two birds with one stone.

For several weeks I’ve been going through all my digital and film files (since the early 70’s) looking for photographs of the Savannah riverfront and changes to it over time, initially for material a friend could use in a presentation on the history of that area, and, consequently, a personal photographic exhibition, “The Persistence of Change.” The show will be hanging in the Rotunda of Savannah City Hall from August 28 until the end of the year.

My biggest takeaway from all that research is that I wish I had done a better job of recording times, dates, places, details to go with the images. I’ll be 77 in a couple of weeks and I’m beginning to wonder if relying on memory to provide that information was the best approach.

The second project was for my Rotary (Rotary Club of Savannah). I provide some photographs of club activity for our social media and I noticed recently that our Facebook cover photo was in poor shape, bad definition, like a JPEG file that has been opened and re-saved 8-10 times. To add a cover photo on my personal FB page, I’ve always just dropped in the file and then moved it around to get the best cropping within the context of the image. I imagine most people do it that way, but it is a very specific format, 8.51 x 3.15. (There are some variations on this because of mobile applications.)

Using the pool of photographs from the riverfront, and a previous, broader Savannah area assortment, I looked for compositions that exploited that strong horizontal shape, cropping them to the specific proportions in editing rather than shoehorning in something that might have been a strong photograph, but which actually lost some impact or important information because of the odd cropping. The final result–I now have a folder of assorted “Savannah landmark” photos for Rotary to use and some pretty pictures I can easily drop into my personal FB cover, so maybe I’ll change them more frequently than I have in the past.

For more of Bill’s photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index.