I’ve written many times about photographs taken from my childhood or from my children’s childhood. When I was young, black and white snapshots were still the norm. My grandfather got a color camera sometime while I was still a toddler, but my dad didn’t get one of those snazzy new (and expensive) devices until I was in grade school.
I got my first camera—a Kodak Brownie—when I was about eight, then I was given a Kodak Instamatic sometime in middle school. I stuck with that technology until after I was in college. The cartridges for the Instamatic were easy to use, but costly for my childhood allowance. So I only took snapshots on vacations. Home life was too prosaic to capture on film.
When I went to Europe at age 15, my dad gave me his SLR camera to take, but I had a hard time loading the film, and I lost most of the pictures I took. Not only was 35mm film hard to use, but it was pricey to develop. Because of the expense, I avoided taking pictures unless I thought I had a good shot.
In addition to cost, I was a poor photographer. My youthful self was not very good at framing pictures, getting the horizon straight, keeping thumbs out of the viewfinder, or otherwise taking photographs worth preserving. Plus, the snapshots themselves aged and the colors deteriorated.
Moreover, in those days, photographs could only be exchanged in person or through the mail. My parents and grandparents sent envelopes of snapshots after birthdays and vacations and Christmas. Once in a while, another occasion would merit a mailing of pictures.
By the time my kids came along, we had self-loading cameras that took better pictures than the Instamatic. But otherwise, the same problems remained. Kodak didn’t begin offering digital images along with printed photos until after my kids were in grade school. I have several CDs with pictures I took of my kids in the 1990s, and I need to upload those to my computer while I still have a CD reader. Soon, CDs are likely to go the way of VCR tapes.
Sharing pictures remained difficult when my kids were young. I mailed off many photos to my parents, just as they had to my grandparents a generation earlier. As developing photos became less expensive and my discretionary income grew, I often had two copies made of a whole roll of film, then mailed off the best pictures.
I still have many of those old photos, those taken when I was small and when my kids were small. I reclaimed them after my parents died. Some of them show up from time to time in my blog posts. Often, these are the first time that these pictures have been digitized, which is the best way to preserve them into posterity.
Not until smartphones came along about the turn of the century did we begin taking pictures that were digitized from the start—photographs that never touched film or paper. Only then could we take snapshots, evaluate them, and discard the bad ones for free. We could keep just the good ones. But of course, since it was free to take and save the picture, there was no reason to discard the bad ones (unless they made you look like a dork, of course).
In addition, editing bad pictures became quite easy. I have become adept at cropping pictures, as well as at fixing a slanted horizon and bad lighting.
And I could email my best digital pictures—also for free. I still made a selection of which photos to forward. Plus, by then my kids didn’t involve me in all their activities, so I had fewer pictures to send to my parents.
Fast forward twenty years. Now I have a granddaughter. She has been photographed almost every day of her young life. As noted above, with smartphones, each digital picture is free to shoot. And uploading them to the cloud to save them also costs nothing, because many services offer a terabyte of data free to subscribers.’
My sister-in-law gave my husband and me an Aura frame for Christmas. Since our granddaughter’s birth in February, we have been the recipient of frequent pictures of her. In fact, I have told my daughter and son-in-law that I expect new photos at least twice a week—and they have complied.
So instead of printing snapshots and sending the best with a letter via the U.S. Mail, pictures of my granddaughter show up in my living room moments after they are taken. I feel I am a part of her life in ways that my parents and grandparents could not experience with their grandchildren.
And I can upload the pictures from the Aura app on my phone into my saved Photos directory on the cloud. No physical photo albums or brag books for me, but I will whip out my phone if anyone even mentions my granddaughter. My digital brag book is bigger than anything my grandmother ever carted around in her purse.
How do you see technology changing through the generations?
