Day 242 – A Year of Gratitude and Joy – Cameras

There’s a little voice inside my head that gets louder as I get older. It’s the voice that says, “Remember when (fill in the blank) was so much harder?” That voice was screaming at me recently asking me if I remembered how hard it was to take a picture … or get it developed … when I was young.

My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic and used flash cubes. For anyone who doesn’t know what those are, I had to use google to find a picture. I got it when I was ten years old and we were on our way to Washington DC for a short vacation.

My dad had a really fancy Nikon camera with several lenses. It was one of the things he picked up somewhere in Asia when he was stationed in Vietnam. He spent hours teaching himself how to take a great picture. He set up mini studios in our home and took family Christmas photos.

Somewhere in my early teens, I upgraded to a “pocket sized” camera. It was also an Instamatic and used smaller 110 film. I thought I was ever-so-cool because I could slip that little camera into my purse. The trouble was, I still had to be VERY judicious about what pictures I snapped to conserve precious film. 

Since then I’ve upgraded many times. I remember my first digital camera and it’s comparatively teeny tiny SD card. I spent many hours learning the auto focus feature and teaching myself about lighting techniques and focal lengths.

Fast forward to today – the camera in my phone takes MUCH better pics than I ever snapped with a single lens reflex model. It has THREE lenses built in. It corrects for lighting, offers more modes than any traditional camera I could afford. It easily fits in my pocket and has a HUGE memory. 

There are a lot of memes out there that joke about how those of us “of a certain age” are glad phone cameras didn’t exist to capture the crazy things we did as kids. I call that a bonus for growing up before the digital age. But the ease of today’s camera is distracting. It took several trips before I realized I was spending more time with my camera in my face than I was enjoying the actual view. I’ve changed my ways (for the most part). 

I am grateful for the ease of today’s camera phones and filled with joy at the volume of memories I’ve been able to capture and save. 

There’s a whole world out there just waiting to be explored. Snap a quick pic, and take time to enjoy the view.

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