Curmudgeon wrote:
Being old and not sleeping as well as I used to, I woke up about 4AM a couple mornings ago with this simple thought running through my mind: The trouble with digital photography is there is no analog output.
No, stop, wait a minute! Before you go off on a rant, let me set the ground rules. This post is aimed a specific group: Over 65 years of age, grew up with parents, grandparents and if you were lucky great grandparents, owned a box camera of some kind and worked up from there, you took snapshots because that's what you did with a Brownie Hawkeye, your parents took snapshots with a Brownie Junior Six-20 or equivalent.
Now, it is holiday season 1954. The family gets together for a three generation dinner. After dinner everyone is in a mellow mood, a little wine, a drink or two for the adults and a sugar buzz for the kids. The oldsters start to tell stories about the good old days and suddenly grandma's eyes light up and she leaves the room. Two minutes later she's back with a stack of photo albums, grandpa is right behind with his arms full of shoe boxes, it's picture time. Ten minutes later there are pictures and photo albums scattered all over the room. The stories are more animated now, more wine. The kids who are still up start to learn what it was really like in the "Good old days".
Now we fast forward to 1963. Great grand parents are gone now and parents host the annual family dinner. Same scenario. Drinks, wine and dinner albums and shoe boxes come out again and we watch another generation grow up. This time though some of the pictures are Polaroid. Still everything is a snapshot.
Fast forward again 2018 we are the grand parents, maybe great grand parents. If we are lucky we still have the family dinner, we have too many drinks and too much wine. After dinner we sit around with our family and the topic drifts to the "Good old days". Suddenly my wife's eyes light up and she disappears down the hall and returns a few minutes later with a lap top computer and a stack of SD cards.
Probably just an old man's nostalgia but it doesn't seem to project the same warm feelings as passing pictures around and trying to remember where and when they were taken and telling stories about what the mean and not what they show.
That's what I mean about no analog output. There is something important being lost. To me, reading a book is preferable to reading a book on an electronic device. I hold a picture in my hand, the paper is stiff and crinkly, the picture is probably a little faded and brown but it is somehow more real than an image on a screen. The very fact of holding it makes the memory more real somehow. Again all of this could be the fantasy of a nostalgic old Curmudgeon, but...
Being old and not sleeping as well as I used to, I... (
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The medium is the message. No matter what the medium is.