I just finished looking at some old albums filled with pictures from high school. I saved the albums from a life lost in the garage of my parents' home in Corona. Maybe only a handful of days are captured, but the pictures made me laugh out loud alone in my livingroom. Ah, high school. When we were all cool. When we posed for most pictures.
Although I always had to worry about having enough film and then getting that film developed and printed, I think I took more pictures back then. Or maybe it was that not everyone had a camera, so it was important that someone captured the moments on film.
I'm a little sad that I can't have a similar experience in my livingroom with old pictures. I can't stumble across old albums and sit and take them all in. At least those taken with digital cameras. With digital pictures, I'd have to open folders to look at pictures and scroll through hundreds of pictures. There's no limit to the pictures I can take for one event. And with one click, I can delete any pictures I hate. The embarrassing pictures of high school seem to stick around--it seems wrong to throw anything away when the money was spent to print it. I just don't take the time to choose the set of pictures I'd like to get printed. That stage of the picture process is now irreversibly removed from the equation. I can view pictures immediately and that usually ends the experience.
Reminiscing in this digital world just isn't the same. Sure, I look back at old pictures sometimes. There's perfectly organized in folders. It's not like finding an old box of pictures that never made it into an album and there's you as a baby and suddenly you're in high school and then another one with you in junior high. You can sit with a friend and go through albums at the same time and share thoughts and exclaim at how silly we look or how serious we took ourselves. No, now we have to crowd around a computer screen, which doesn't seem as heartwarming.
Comments (2)
true that. what's a bit sadder is even though we know how nice it'd be to be able to have a physical photo, i can't even remember the last time I printed out some digital pics.
ahh yes, good ole days.