When someone complains to you that nothing in life is simple anymore, this is what they mean by that.
Not that many years ago, we took a few photos of our families at special events using relatively large cameras into which we had placed a roll of film. Because the film was expensive to buy and expensive to develop, we were sparing in the number of shots we’d rattle off. One roll of 24 or 36 might contain images of events spanning a month, even two or three.
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When all the frames had been exposed, the film was removed from the camera and, if you lived in town, taken to a camera shop to be processed. In the country, we’d seal the precious canister in a special yellow envelope and ship it off to a store in Clinton to be dealt with. Three weeks later, the exciting day would arrive when a package of prints and negatives would arrive in the mailbox at the end of the lane.
Somehow, using this procedure, which seems primitive in this digital age – equivalent to preparing a woodstove for lighting as opposed to the modern gas or electric appliances – we ended up with album after album of photographs, just enough to document the days of our lives. There might not be a photo of you every year of your early life or in every situation (thankfully), but there’d be enough to chart your progression from child to youth to young adult. And on from there.
Enter the digital camera age.
The other day, I took some photos of my son and his friends playing hockey on our backyard rink. Before I knew it, I had rattled off 31 shots. I don’t know if my parents would expose 31 frames with photos of all their seven kids in a whole year!
One night this week, I spent almost 90 minutes at my computers, transferring a couple of hundred images from two tiny memory disks onto my hard drives. It is necessary to do this, because if a computer dies, so too will my photos. To be safe, I also burn them onto CDs from time to time.
All of this cataloguing is time consuming as photos have to be grouped into folders with names describing them – Christmas 2007, last day of school, birthday parties, etc. – because the shots all have long numbers assigned to them by the camera and if they are not properly ordered and labelled, the search for any one particular photo can be a monumental task and maddening.
Of course, the temptation was just too great one day and a desktop photo printer now sits on the computer table. The first few days, of course, prints came flying out of that thing like the ammunition from a BB gun. Now, it mostly sits there gathering dust. And if it sits too long, the ink nozzles seal over and the thing has to be readjusted. It gobbles up expensive ink cartridges like a hungry cat eats kibble.
And now I stay up late doing the work of the people who used to develop our family photos at the camera shop in Clinton.
I know that prints are competing now for other ways of displaying photos such as digital frames that present slideshows of all your shots and even small keychain frames that do the same. You can have music accompanying the photos in the frame.
The irony is, however, picture-taking has not been simplified nor is it any cheaper.
And there are far fewer photos to date in our “hardcopy” albums than our parents managed to collect with their old-fashioned ways.
©2008 Jim Hagarty
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