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Wednesday, September 29, 2010

The Pathology of Photography

I don't know how anyone else feels about their digital camera, but let me sum up my emotions thusly:

car wreck!
car wreck!

We bought the camera roughly 15 months ago, after the old one broke.  It has about 1000 pictures on it, all of them family photos (I tend to deal more promptly with the craft related stuff).  That's roughly two pictures a day (and I've deleted some!)  But what I haven't done is the usual sort and save and delete off the camera, and now it has become a task of Herculean proportions.  And yet not pressing, as there is still room for 3500 more pictures on the memory card...

So, I have two children.  For nearly the first three years of the first's life (let's call her B) I meticulously curated the museum of her photographs.  Then I lost my job*, and now, as I spend most of my time with her, I no longer relish the idea of spending my free time combing through her archives, or those of her baby sister, A, with whom I spend even more time.

Which makes part of me long for the old days and the expense and inconvenience of film camera, at least for family photos.

Of course, this does make me feel guilty!  To be the parent rebelling against the system!  But I do take pictures, I just don't look at them afterward.  And according to my calculations, it'll take 4 years to fill up the the memory card, so I have plenty of time to procrastinate.

But, there is, of course, much to be said for being able to take hundreds of pictures.  Not having to settle for out of focus or extremely washed out or people making weird faces because now you can take 10 pictures where you used to only take one.

There is the unexpected joy when an experimental shot pays off:

birthday cupcake
oooh...

There is the odd picture that says so much about someone's personality, taken while you were waiting for the subjects to take the task of being photographed seriously:

kid and bird
will no one look at the camera?

And there is the fact that being a craftsperson or a knitwear designer in this age means having and using one's digital camera.   Sigh.

* I didn't lose my job, it was taken from me...

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