Photographs

I spent a chunk of time today creating a Facebook photo album of my trip to Iceland.  I just returned last night, but there are at least two good reasons to get that photo album uploaded, described, and posted.  One is that I am afraid if I don't do it right away, I will forget where a particular picture was taken or what some landmark is called.  The other is that I am so in love with a pictorial documentation of an amazing experience that I've just had.  Viewing my pictures in my camera window just doesn't do justice to the beauty of the landscape.  But to see them on a full computer screen?  Almost like I'm there again.  Almost.

I am of the Kodak Instamatic generation.  (We were one up from the Brownie generation.)  For any younger readers of this blog, what you need to understand is that we had to buy actual film for the camera.  Each roll of film was good for 12, 24 or 36 pictures and was priced accordingly.  In other words, you had to pay before you even took a picture.  And then you had to decide if a subject was film-worthy.  You would not, for instance, take nine pictures of Gullfoss Falls because that would use up 3/4 of your 12-picture roll of film that you'd just paid for.  There was also no way to know if you'd taken a good picture.  You just had to hope that you were in focus and that you got a good shot on the first (and only) try.

When you'd finished taking a roll of film, there was the fear that you might accidentally expose the film.  Again, no way of knowing if you had while you filled out the information on the envelope and dropped the film into the slot at your local supermarket for pick-up the next day.  And then you waited a week for the pictures to be returned to the supermarket.  Receipt in hand, you excitedly went to the counter to pick up your photos.  Of course, you had to pay for the development of the film because this was different than purchasing the film.  And you had to pay before you even knew if the pictures were any good.

Once the transaction was complete, you could race out to the car, rip open the envelope, and view your pictures.  You might have a collection of blurry images or even some black nothingness because the flash didn't go off.  (Don't even get me started on flash cubes.)  Or you could have someone else's pictures.  Mistakes were made.  If that was the case, you would return the unfamiliar pictures to the store and hope that whoever had your pictures would do the same.  But chances are, you would never see your pictures in this lifetime.  They likely ended up in someone's garbage.

Or you might be lucky and have some good pictures. Many of us have found our old pictures in our "magnetic" photo albums.  They are blurry and bathed in an orange hue.  Nonetheless, they speak of an event in our lives that we must have felt was important to remember.  And so we do remember.  And I guess we don't really mind that the quality of the photo sucks.  It's a picture that comes into focus in living color in our memory.

But now?  With digital point-and-shoot cameras or iPhones?  You can take 200 pictures of Gullfoss Falls without ever once thinking that you were being wasteful.  And then you can pick the best one and delete the other 199 of them.  Everybody has hundreds upon hundreds of pictures.  Is it possible to love them all?

I think so.