Ok, moment of truth. How many of us have thanked technology for coming up with digital photography? Almost all of us I bet. Every household now boasts at least one digital camera. All the uncles and auntys are totally familiar with the USB cable and picture transfer, all the way to the uploading of the images on the internet and web-sharing as well. The good old days of film roll are now obsolete and so are the first digicams that had floppy disk/zip drive memories. Now's the age of miniaturization, what with the advanced memory devices which started out at SD and have gone well and beyond micro-SD to built in large memories too. Everything's as perfect can be.
I have a confession to make. I am not entirely satisfied with this arrangement. Back at home in India, we have a huge cabinet stuffed with picture albums that document the childhood of my brother and me. It has all those trips we made as a family, those birthdays, those family outings, my brother's upanayanam, our Kuwait days, and what not. And sifting through these pictures every vacation is a trip down memory lane for me. And though I can do a similar thing on the laptop, sifting through folder after folder of saved photos, I don't do it. And even if I did the warm glow of memories isn't as strong. I don't know why. There's another problem in this. In the days of the film roll which restricted us to 36 pictures per roll (with a charge for development and approximately Rs 5 per "maxi" print), we were judicious in our usage of the roll. And hence every photo was thought out and worth it. Come the digitial era, of course we are thankful for it eliminates the mental tension of waiting for the photos to develop - Was the film inserted correctly? Will Ihave a blank roll? Were too many pics blurred? No tension at all. Instant previews. A bit blurry? No problem. Take 3-4 pictures extra just to make sure you got everything right. You can always delete the ones you don't want later. But hang on a second... how many of you actually go through all the pictures and delete the ones that don't need to be kept? I do. And it's a tedious process. Add to that "selecting" a maximum of a 100 photos from a folder of well over 500 per trip to share with family and friends. And then "working" on them - brightness, contrast, blah blue... And then adding comments to these pictures (ok that's not mandatory but somehow people got very attached to the comments I give under each picture and so now it's no longer an option)... and uploading everything. It's all a big abuse of digital memory and I am only one of the million doing this. And after this tedious process, I kind of lose the interest to sift through those pictures again for a long time. And that's true of every trip/occassion. And so when you think of wanting to relive some of those memories, more often than not, you end up going to your own Picasa album of the event (it has a more concise set) than to the real folder which has one too many extra pictures.
And what about prints? Are you one of those very few who take select prints of your trip just for the keeps? Or is it the one odd blow-up or the personalized calendar? If you are like most people it's the latter. Thanks to all of this... when my laptop crashed and lost a good deal of pictures from recent trips, I experienced no tremendous grief. I still had the Picasa albums... and so what if they weren't the real high quality? I wasn't doing anything with them anyways. Sad but true. I'd love to hear what the rest of the world thinks on this whole conundrum. So if you have something to say, say it!!
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