Eight.

So!  Today is our eighth wedding anniversary.  We're going out to dinner tonight to celebrate.  I can't wait for some normal adult conversations with my favorite person and an uninterrupted meal that I don't have to share.  It's really the simple things that are complete luxuries these days.

Gee.  I wonder why.

So we were reminiscing and ended up getting out our photo album.   Which prompted a whole discussion about how completely terrible our wedding pictures are.

No, really.  It's ok.  We've both come to terms with it.  See we got married at absolutely the WORST time for photography.  2004 was right on the cusp of digital.  Which means that everything was still based on old photography methods. 

For example our wedding album looks like this:

Old school, silver edges, limited amount of prints.  Not even close to one of the fancy graphic-designed books that most people we know have.

But!  It does have 94 pictures in it.  Which is a huge amount when you consider that the pricing lists we originally discussed with the photographer were based on rolls of film.  Yes.  Film.  At 36 per roll the original plan for our wedding day was to have 108 pictures taken TOTAL.

So when our photographer shot digital we were thrilled.  Because that meant that they took wait for it... 274 pictures. Today it's crazy to even think of having less than 2000 taken of a wedding day.

The downside to the digital conversion, of course, was that our wedding was shot on an early DSLR.  Which I'm guessing was less powerful than the camera on my iphone. So even the blowups in our wedding alum start to get a little blurry:

This would be an awesome picture.  If we weren't blurry.

And there was NO option to purchase full digital copies.  Nope.  Now that's just included.  Then I had to beg and plead and pay a ton of money for a CD of very small files.  The whole set is on flickr here but don't try to blow them up bigger than this:

348x232 pixles should be enough for anything you'd ever want, right?

 Or heaven forbid print them.  No bueno.

There's also quite a bit missing from the day.  Mainly because photographers were still thinking analog.  If you only get 108 pictures total those need to count.  So you take the posed family photos and none of the candid ones that are so popular now.

Most of our photographs are some variation of this.

Or nonsense like this.  It's possible that our photographer was a douchebag now that I think about it...

Any of the detail shots are ones that I specifically asked for.  Now photographers take tons of detail pictures as a matter of course.  Dress!  Shoes!  Rings! Cake!  Invites!  Bouquet!  All photographed individually and completely.  This is what we got:

Quick put all of the details in one shot!  Don't want to waste film!  Wait.

Also because it was early digital there was no post-processing.  Photoshop?  HA!  Nope.  Everything Straight Out of the Camera.  Not even the benefit of the developing process.  Oh wait.  They did do a few of the fun early digital tricks such as converting to black and white:

Are you impressed?

Or terrible things with color like this:

spot color makes the baby Jesus cry

At least we were spared any sepia nonsense.   Although I believe I put the smackdown on that business pre-wedding.  There is never any excuse for sepia.

And yet I love me some instagram.  Go figure.

So yeah.  We got married at absolutely the worst time for photography.  But you know what?   It was the best time for US.  We were starting our adult lives and we wanted to do it together.  Completely.  Married.  And I wouldn't change that for all the shiny, modern, designed photobooks and full-sized digital images in the world.

Although this does make me want to get some nice, professional photographs taken of our family... anyone know of anyone good?