Larry Hnetka Goes HMmmm

Has digital photography turned you into a crazy shutter happy shooter like me? I’m plowing through over 1,000 digital photos I took on my recent holiday.

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Doorway to big house in Nice, France.

I confess this weird trigger-happy shutter button affliction has been getting worse ever since I went digital many years ago. These days, I’ll take a shot of practically anything including an entire series of doors and doorways recently.

I’m busy categorizing, adjusting and discarding these digital memories. I have a photoprinter for quick, cheap and cheerful prints if I need one. On occasion, I upload photos to FuturePhoto — usually when they have prints on sale.

I remember the old days with my deluxe Pentex SLR 35mm camera when I’d compose, set knobs and distances and frame the photo before actually taking the snap. I think the most film I used on vacation was about 4 rolls of 24 pictures.

Then you went through the long process of sending the film off to be processed. Two or three weeks later, I’d gulp at the cost of the prints when I picked them up.

The excitement of actually seeing your photos three weeks later was always a treat. In my attic, there are several dusty boxes filled with photos that never made it into an album.

There are numerous photos in those boxes of group shots where inevitably one person was too tall and so only a headless torso stands in the lineup of forgotten friends. I flipped through who knows how many shots of expansive blue skies with a tiny speck of something or other in the centre of the photo because I wanted to “make sure” I captured the entire scene.

In these days of digital photos, I have a small box full of archived photos I’ve tansferred to CDs. It’s a pain when I want an old photo and have to scan through CD after CD as I’ve been too lazy to organize them.

This is how I gauge how old I’m getting — many of my childhood memories come from the photographs taken with the popular Brownie Hawkeye Flash model camera that every family owned I think.

I would smile and wait for the flashbulb to pop and blind me for a second. Then I’d laugh as my dad ejected the bulb and danced around because it was so hot in his hand. I miss the old days of 35mm film, processing and waiting for processed prints.

Somehow snapping shot after digital shot and then filing them away on CDs haphazardly just isn’t as much fun.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 12:02:17 AM and is filed under HMmmm, WEBSTUFF. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.