My favorite photo from the Hermitage...

It's been some time since I've been to a major museum here in the States, so I don't know whether the wrinkle has caught on here, but at very nearly every museum I've been to recently in Russia, there is an extra charge upon admission if you want to use your camera while wandering the exhibits. And this is as true of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg as it is of the Cosmodrome Museum at Baikonur.

At the Hermitage, the privilege costs an additional 200 rubles. I forked it over.

The ability to take photographs - and to do so easily and extensively, for this is the digital age, where we are not limited to film rolls of 36 exposures that cost money to process - masks a serious pitfall: it generally turns off the analytical part of your brain, the one that forces you to observe instead of just see.

I noticed that in Moscow the morning I returned from Baikonur when, having to wait for the Beeline office to open and bereft of my camera, I was of necessity forced to look more closely at my surroundings and the people passing through them. As a result, that hour is much more memorable to me now than any walk down Moscow streets I have taken with my camera in hand.

Still, without my camera, I would not have caught this image, of (I presume) a grandmother with her granddaughter, examining Rembrandt's masterpiece Danaë:


It did not strike me at the time, but looking at this image now, I am flooded with the recollection of my grandmother taking me to the World's Fair at Flushing Meadow Park back in 1964 or 1965, and not just once, but several times. (This, to the vast surprise of my parents.)

Awash in my own memories, I look at this photo and am happy for the little girl.

Cheers...