The Quest for the Perfect Photograph

For those of you who are completely and totally ignorant of even the most famous elements of history, this is the Rosetta Stone. It's in the British Museum in London, and it's the inspiration for two stories, one of which can be read here.

My own story about the Rosetta Stone involves a bunch of Asian folks. You see, at the end of July 2004 I took a weekend trip to London. The first place I went the morning after arriving was to the British Museum, and since I don't care about the garbage that some American Indians or the Chinese gave to the Brits for display purposes. I went straight to the section on the Ancient Near East, and followed on to the wicked sweet stuff from Greece and Rome.

The first room they have in the Ancient Near East section was the Egyptian room, and in addition to a massive sculpture of Rameses II (the Charlton Heston of Egyptian Pharoahs, to Akhenaton's Pauly Shore), the central piece is the Rosetta Stone. Now, it's extremely difficult to get a good picture of the Rosetta Stone. "Why?", you ask? Is it the reflective glass and museum lighting? Is it the texture and surface of the stone itself? No; it's all of the Japanese tourists, crowding around the thing and snapping twenty pictures apiece.

The picture you see there is the only one I took of the Rosetta Stone. Like a sniper, my skills as both a rifleman and a photographer are finely honed. I got my equipment ready, sighted in, and then waited, patiently, with precise breathing, until there was a break in the throng of Asian tourists. Then, like the expert marksman that I am, I triggered my camera with the precision usually reserved for NASA machinists and captured the image you see here today.

Special thanks once again to The Wife, who has encouraged me to post more pictures on my Flickr account.