Tinted vision fragments: A Studio L3 Compendium challenge

For those of you who are new to Tim Holtz style paper crafting and who have not joined the Compendium challenge over at Studio L3, you're missing out on a great learning experience.

This also must mean that you miss out on my weekly project presentation and unrelated story. Now you're really sad, aren't you?

Luckily you're just in time for this week's challenge, and a reason to dig through some old family photos. Which, actually, was ANOTHER challenge.

What if I choose a "once in a lifetime" photo and ruin it? What if I use a photo of say, a couple with whom my Oma was friends? And what if I ruin the damn photo? I can't very well call the local photo mat and ask for a reprint.

As it turns out, I didn't have to face that question entirely. I found a photo amongst the hundreds of "Oh, cools" and "Who the hell is thats?" which had already been altered.

Apparently someone in the photo pissed off the person who owned the photo, because his head is inexplicably cut out. I guess we don't like HIM anymore.

That's not even the funny part of the photo. That's the depressing, "we've all been there, even our grandmothers more than 60 years ago," story.

The funny thing is the activity in the photo. This isn't a picture of two German couples performing a group Captain Morgan pose. This IS a picture (or was, anyway) of two German couples Legoed together, showing off their left feet, clad in wooden clogs.

Apparently even Germans in the 1940s felt that it was appropriate to go to Holland, buy wooden shoes and take silly photos while wearing them. Sort of like Americans going to Mexico and donning sombreros for photo time ... except that's also offensive, and again an entirely different subject.

What do you suppose visitors to our little chunk of the blue planet photograph? Perhaps they stand in front of the Grand Canyon, lean way back, left hand on the faux bloated belly, right hand tugging at the overly-tight belt, "Quick! Quick! Hansel! Take the photo!"

Then a granddaughter or cousin in Taiwan or somewhere sees the photos on a blog and says, "Oh yeah, that's our grandparents. They're visiting the United States." You know? Because bloated Americans ... well I thought it was funny.

All of this leads us to the moral of today's story (can you believe I have a moral here): The internet means no waiting for you to die before your embarrassing photos are available to relatives and strangers for purposes of mocking. So you should always be doing something WORTH the price of being mocked.

Between those times, hide away in your craft room and work on your Studio L3 Compendium Challenge piece.