The Shoebox
I have had a sudden awakening from a long, technology-induced slumber. About a dozen years ago, after decades of burning through tens of thousands of rolls of photographic film, I started dipping my toes into the then-shallow digital imaging pool. Slowly at first, I continued to shoot film, and scanned images before delivering them to clients in digital format. I became fully film-independent several years ago, and the world of silver salts and toxic chemicals receded quickly in my rear view mirror. This has been just fine with me. My propeller beanie spins all the more rapidly when I can solve complex imaging challenges with nothing more than a few keystrokes and a bit of nimble mousing.
Digital photography at the professional level is nothing new. Only when the pro market had sufficiently advanced the technology, and the desktop computer had become a ubiquitous addition to everyday life did consumers start to get their hands on affordable digital cameras. This has, for the most part, been a good thing. Consumer and "prosumer" level digital cameras are capable of astounding image quality. One thing, though, has been lost - the snapshooter's shoebox full of pictures.
In the past, pictures were taken, film was developed and prints were made. Every image you took, no matter how good or how bad, was printed without prejudice. Part of the excitement of picking up a freshly developed roll of film was seeing what "turned out". If you accidently took a picture of your feet as you were walking through the zoo, it got printed right along with the pictures of the alpha male chimpanzee hurling foul little surprises at your mortified Aunt Myrtle. Every one of these pictures, once returned from the mysterious process of development, was eventually sent to safekeeping in a cardboard box, or maybe even in a scrapbook or album. These were stashed away, hidden from view and sometimes forgotten. Pictures became slices of life, preserved as in a time capsule and buried away from prying eyes.
Today's photographic process is a bit different. The average digital snapshooter holds his or her cameras at arm's length and composes their future memory on a teeny LCD screen on the back of their camera. To the average bystander, this looks pretty goofy, and gets that much funnier when the camera is held by someone wearing bifocals. The net effect is that of someone trying to compose a scene by looking at a distant postage stamp - much smaller than what they could have seen through the camera's little peep-hole viewfinder to begin with. At the decisive moment, they click the shutter button - which, on some of today's cameras starts a cruel and invisible process that seems to take a few days before the shutter actually fires. People age and retire waiting for the darned thing to click.
Once the image has finally been recorded, many cameras offer up a preview image on that same teeny LCD screen. The photographer then launches into a behavior photo snobs refer to as "chimping" - looking at the screen and emitting a series of disapproving simian grunts and/or soft "oohs" of satisfaction at the resulting image. Meanwhile, back at the zoo, a real chimp has done an impromptu skit in which he has exactly duplicated the screaming visage of your panicked Aunt Myrtle, complete with a fainting spell and a cell-phone call to a lawyer. You, however, have missed this shot because you were trying to decide whether your snapshot of the smiling chimp doing his Nolan Ryan windup was worth keeping.
Simplify. Do not chimp your pictures. Do not take your camera home and cull out the clinkers. Take a chance. Keep them all. In fact, print them all. Take your camera's little memory card to the closest drug store, grocery store, big-box warehouse or anywhere else that has a photo department and print every last one of those defective memories. Take them home with you, pass them around at the next birthday party or Sunday dinner, and after everyone, including your Aunt Myrtle, has been exposed to your photographic genius, write all the people's names in the pictures on the back and put your pictures in a shoebox. Reebok, Sketchers, NineWest or Candies, the brand doesn't matter. What matters is that the pictures somehow survive. You may, years from now, find that some of your mistakes are more important than you might believe today. People and places you regard as commonplace today might be tomorrow's gateway to recalling things long since lost. Maybe in the larger scheme, the pictures you take aren't really for you, anyway. Stripped of today's technology and tucked safely away in shoeboxes or books, your pictures, your contribution to the time capsule, will survive long after you've moved on.
Digital photography at the professional level is nothing new. Only when the pro market had sufficiently advanced the technology, and the desktop computer had become a ubiquitous addition to everyday life did consumers start to get their hands on affordable digital cameras. This has, for the most part, been a good thing. Consumer and "prosumer" level digital cameras are capable of astounding image quality. One thing, though, has been lost - the snapshooter's shoebox full of pictures.
In the past, pictures were taken, film was developed and prints were made. Every image you took, no matter how good or how bad, was printed without prejudice. Part of the excitement of picking up a freshly developed roll of film was seeing what "turned out". If you accidently took a picture of your feet as you were walking through the zoo, it got printed right along with the pictures of the alpha male chimpanzee hurling foul little surprises at your mortified Aunt Myrtle. Every one of these pictures, once returned from the mysterious process of development, was eventually sent to safekeeping in a cardboard box, or maybe even in a scrapbook or album. These were stashed away, hidden from view and sometimes forgotten. Pictures became slices of life, preserved as in a time capsule and buried away from prying eyes.
Today's photographic process is a bit different. The average digital snapshooter holds his or her cameras at arm's length and composes their future memory on a teeny LCD screen on the back of their camera. To the average bystander, this looks pretty goofy, and gets that much funnier when the camera is held by someone wearing bifocals. The net effect is that of someone trying to compose a scene by looking at a distant postage stamp - much smaller than what they could have seen through the camera's little peep-hole viewfinder to begin with. At the decisive moment, they click the shutter button - which, on some of today's cameras starts a cruel and invisible process that seems to take a few days before the shutter actually fires. People age and retire waiting for the darned thing to click.
Once the image has finally been recorded, many cameras offer up a preview image on that same teeny LCD screen. The photographer then launches into a behavior photo snobs refer to as "chimping" - looking at the screen and emitting a series of disapproving simian grunts and/or soft "oohs" of satisfaction at the resulting image. Meanwhile, back at the zoo, a real chimp has done an impromptu skit in which he has exactly duplicated the screaming visage of your panicked Aunt Myrtle, complete with a fainting spell and a cell-phone call to a lawyer. You, however, have missed this shot because you were trying to decide whether your snapshot of the smiling chimp doing his Nolan Ryan windup was worth keeping.
Simplify. Do not chimp your pictures. Do not take your camera home and cull out the clinkers. Take a chance. Keep them all. In fact, print them all. Take your camera's little memory card to the closest drug store, grocery store, big-box warehouse or anywhere else that has a photo department and print every last one of those defective memories. Take them home with you, pass them around at the next birthday party or Sunday dinner, and after everyone, including your Aunt Myrtle, has been exposed to your photographic genius, write all the people's names in the pictures on the back and put your pictures in a shoebox. Reebok, Sketchers, NineWest or Candies, the brand doesn't matter. What matters is that the pictures somehow survive. You may, years from now, find that some of your mistakes are more important than you might believe today. People and places you regard as commonplace today might be tomorrow's gateway to recalling things long since lost. Maybe in the larger scheme, the pictures you take aren't really for you, anyway. Stripped of today's technology and tucked safely away in shoeboxes or books, your pictures, your contribution to the time capsule, will survive long after you've moved on.
