Before and After

I'm sorting through all the photos I've taken in the past 22 months, including the Tonga ones, with a view to printing and albumising them all. Digital photography makes it all too easy to neglect these old-fashioned processes, yet I do value hard copies of images, and would like to retain the good habits I was in when I was still using film.

Anyway, during the sorting of the photos I took, filed month-by-month on my computer, I was struck by these two images of the same pile of driftwood, taken nine months apart. The first was taken in September 2008, when I'd been in Tonga only a couple of months, and the second was taken in May, on the weekend before I left. They struck me as a fitting metaphor for how time makes changes, on every level of our lives.