The Digital Dilemma

Since we got our first digital camera over two years ago, we've been amazed at the clarity and brilliance of the photos, especially when it comes to shooting nature/outdoor scenes. These cameras capture the lighting so accurately, the crispness of every detail, that you almost feel like you're right in the scene that was photographed.

What's that? You say you'd love to see some of them? Okay, that can be arranged. If you've got some time. And I DO mean a lot of time. Because you'll have to come down to my basement and pull up a chair in front of the computer and wait while I find the folder they're in, click on it to open it, view the thumbnails, and finally, get a slide show going for you. How come you keep looking at your watch? You say you've been sitting here with me for more than five minutes, and you still haven't seen a single photo?

Does that scenario sound familiar to you?

Ah, whatever happened to the days when you'd have actual hard copies of your photos to put in an actual, not virtual, photo album? When someone would ask to see your photos, you could easily and quickly oblige. All you'd have to do is pull out an envelope or a photo album. The only obstacle might be trying to remember which drawer you'd stashed them away in. But now that I've switched to a digital camera, I always seem to be saying, "Well, I haven't made prints of any of them yet."

I was quite the holdout when it came to getting a digital camera. When friends would expound on the virtues of "going digital," I'd counter with arguments about how I like having actual hard copies of my photos. Well, you can just print out the ones you like anytime, they'd suggest. And you can just delete the bad ones. And look at all the cool things you can do with them. You can send photos of the kids to their grandparents right there in an e-mail. You can make your own cards with them, put them on calendars or coffee mugs or mousepads. You can crop them, enhance them, brighten them, turn them into cartoons, turn them upside down. (Now why am I hearing Tom Waits voice in my head rasping, "It dices! It slices!")

Yeah, they were right about all that. And another one they didn't mention: you can insert your photos into your blog, like this:


Morning's light in the Ottawa National Forest, Michigan

And this:


Loon on a lake in the Ottawa National Forest, Michigan

And this:


Sunrise north of Madison, Wisconsin

Yeah, you sure can do all kinds of fun, really artistic stuff with your digital photos...once you've uploaded them to your computer, that is. That's another one of those little steps you have to take before you can even look at them.

But what I really want is just an actual photo on nice glossy stock, one I can hold in my hand or put in an album.

My closest friend and I had a long-standing ritual until I went digital. We both have our own busy lives, and we don't exactly live down the block from one another. But we still manage to get together every couple of months or so. And when we do, one of the questions we always ask each other is: "Do have any new pictures?" And then we invariably pull out the envelopes and catch up on the photo chronicles of many of the events that have taken place in the interim since our last visit. "Here we are at the museum. And this was on M's birthday." etc., etc. I call it a ritual because it really has become a sacred part of our 30-year-friendship over the years, especially since we both started having kids. Besides my mother, my dear friend is just about the only person who actually wants to look at my family photos. So much so that she doesn't just wait until I thrust them in her face; she asks to see them!

But recently I've sadly realized that whenever that part of our visit rolls around now, I just don't have the photos to show her any more. As we sit at my kitchen counter sipping our coffee, I apologetically tell her that I still haven't loaded them onto the computer. Or that they're in there, but I still haven't had any of them printed out. I promise her I'll have some new ones to show her next time I see her. And now that she's gone digital too, I've noticed she's begun making the same apologies to me. So please allow me a moment of silence as this sad thought sinks into my consciousness for the first time: our sacred little photo-sharing ritual seems to be fading away...

...while the virtual folders--labeled neatly by date--pile up in my "My Pictures" file. I just never seem to find the large chunk of time needed to bring them all up on the screen, peruse the thousands of digital photos I've taken, and then spend another eternity waiting for the ones I've selected to upload to a photo site, then place my order. So I just don't.

I can remember spending so many happy hours sitting on the couch with one or both of my older sons beside me, a photo album open on our laps, reliving vacations, birthday parties, and other happy memories while poring over the photos in those albums. It was always a wonderful way to spend time with them in front of a fire on a winter afternoon. But the other day I realized with a stab of guilt that my youngest has rarely spent time with me this way. Once you have your third child, you tend to fall behind on these kinds of things anyway. He was born in 1997; I kept up a valiant effort at keeping the photo albums up to date until around the year 2000. And now that we've gone digital, the backlog is that much worse. So he rarely gets the chance to look at family photos, to revisit his past, to see what he looked like as a baby or sweet little toddler. Rarely have I sat on the couch perusing photo albums with him.

It's kind of sad to think that whenever my family and I want to catch up on the photographic record of our life right now, we have to sit down in front of a computer screen together to do it.

Another example of a technological innovation that was supposed to make life easier and better and save us time really making it more complicated and robbing us of time. And taking something sacred away.