We were using a 35mm film camera when our children were born. We purchased our first digital camera in 2003, when our youngest was a baby. Digital photography offers a lot of advantages, including higher quality images and the option to take countless photos at no cost. Instead of just two shots of the kids at the pumpkin farm, why not twenty? With so many images, we're likely to capture the "perfect" shot. The downside is also the endless images. I rarely go back and delete the blurry photos or the accidental picture of someone's foot. The photos continue to accumulate on the camera roll or in the cloud or on the zip drive.
I could create photo books online. There are so many websites and options for formats and sizes and themes. I attempted to do it just once. After keeping a detailed written journal of our first family trip to Poland, I thought it would be easy to go back and arrange and label the photos in a digital book. I couldn't do it. The options overwhelmed me. The inability to physically touch and arrange the photos flummoxed me. I decided that the journal and a sampling of trip photos - printed at Walgreens and arranged in a simple photo album - beautifully captured our memories.
Prior to the popularity of digital photography, scrapbooking was all the rage. Scrapbooking seemed like something I might like to do. I enjoy making cards or little booklets with personalized poems and doodles and photos. But I found scrapbooking to be overwhelming in the same way I later found digital photo books to be. There were stores and classes, special books and inserts, huge varieties of scissors and punches and other tools. The stickers were too cute or too much faux Victorian sentiment. I abandoned scrapbooking and arranged the photos chronologically in shoe boxes.
So we have shoe boxes of photos in a closet and folders of digital photos on the hard drive. I can find them when I need them for an event or a project. There are images of birthdays and graduations and other milestones, of trips and vacations and reunions. There are photos of ordinary moments too - a boy snuggled on the couch with his favorite book, a girl holding her wiggly kittens, siblings ready for battle with plastic light sabers or running through the sprinkler in the front yard. I adore the snapshots of these everyday occasions. They were not carefully planned and posed or artfully arranged, and yet these photos are appreciated as much as any other. Then I think of the photos from my own childhood. They are of dubious quality, compared to what's produced by modern technology. They are grainy or terribly lit. They are faded Polaroids. There are very few of these photographs at all, in comparison to the endless digital images of today. And how I treasure these photographs, limited both in number and quality. They don't tell the whole story, and they don't tell a "picture-perfect" story, but they tell enough.
I think of the photo of my family gathered near the pool at my aunt's house during summer vacation. My parents and my two oldest brothers are lined up in the back with the five younger children sitting on the diving board. We're in our swimsuits. My parents are wearing sunglasses. We kids are squinty-eyed looking into the sun. Some smiling, others not. In our matching swimsuits, my younger sister and I are gazing at something off to the side. What are we looking at, I wonder?
Today this photo might be passed over in favor of one in which everyone is looking the same way and smiling. That's too bad. Because I love the story this picture tells of my family assembled around the diving board and the memories it evokes. I cherish this imperfectly-composed yet perfectly-captured moment.
No comments:
Post a Comment