Congeries of cross connected concepts
I’ve been involved in digital photography for a number of years, although I only recently upgraded to a digital SLR camera (the D70). I used a film SLR back when I was in high school and other point&shoot fillm cameras but I was never very good at it. With today’s wonderful technology, however, even I can take nice photographs on a regular basis.
Overall this should make for some interesting effects down the road. I take a lot of pictures of my family. When I think back to photographs of my youth, they’re generally of fairly low quality. There’s also the fact that my mother, who lives in a different state, has them so I get to see them only rarely.
My children, on the other hand, will have much readier access to much better and far more numerous photos. Digital photography is so much cheaper on an ongoing basis that I’ve trained myself to take pictures if there’s any possibility of wanting to remember. If not then out I’m out so little money that it’s irrelevant. I remember my mom telling me “it’s not the cost of the camera, it’s the upkeep” meaning the cost of the film and processing. With digital photography, it is to a large extent just the cost of the camera. I got my D70 in early June and I’m already well past 3000 pictures. I doubt I’ve taken that many pictures on every one of my previous cameras put together. Even though I delete many of them (because even a D70 can’t always save the image from my “talent”) that still adds up to a lot of images.
What will also be interesting is the EXIF (“extra information”) data on the images. For old film photographs, it’s easy to lose track of when the photograph was taken. Now, every one of my pictures is tagged with a time and date. Most photo gallery programs will sort based on that to give nice chronological arrangements of the photos. This is really incredibly handy. I wonder how long it will be before GPS units are built in to cameras and that data recorded as well.
Given how fallible people’s memories are, will the pervasiveness of this image and secondary information help improve memories by correcting them or atrophy them because it’s all in the image files?
