Our digital age

It's really rather amazing how much things have changed in just a few short years. I realized, while reading the blogs that I follow, how dependent we are on our digital cameras for our pictures.

It made me become conscious of the huge shifts that are taking place in the world of cameras. Many companies like Kodak, Polaroid, Fujifilm, all the rest of them, are no longer making film! We have shifted, and in a very rapid fashion, from film-based to digital photography. This picture shows the camera I now use (well, mine has 9 megapixels but otherwise is the same) for all my pictures, and what has really changed for me is the immediacy of my results. When I go out hiking with the Seniors, I snap probably fifty pictures and take several of the same scene. Then in the car on the way back to the Senior Center, I go through them and remove probably a dozen, keeping the ones I know I will take a closer look at. By the time I've come home and transferred them to my Mac, I go through them again and edit out maybe another half a dozen. I export some in a smaller format to the desktop and compose my post. The full-sized pictures that I think are pretty good go onto my Flickr site, usually around 12-15.

This is completely different from the days of the film camera. I would buy film for a particular event, usually for outdoors, take the pictures, and if I would be really anxious to see them, take the film to a one-hour photo store to get them developed. If I wanted to use any of them for the internet, I had to scan them in. What a huge difference in process! And of course, most of the time I wouldn't have any particular place to put them on line, because the blogosphere didn't exist back then.

Remember the phrase, "a Kodak moment"? I do. I read this article today about how Kodak is wanting to bring back the moment, about "the REAL Kodak moment is when you share." Frankly, though, the whole moment could only emerge when all the parts had been created and put in place. That moment is here now.
:-)