Before people say “That’s a subjective title, digital cameras have advanced my business and given me thousands of options that conventional photography never could have!” I just want to say that I don’t disagree that they’re a phenomenal invention and open up entirely new horizons.  What I’m trying to say is that our family photo albums are jam packed with photos of my older brothers, myself and two of my younger brothers and then woefully lacking in photographs of the youngest.

I’m sure many people can relate to the following example -

I’m 23, so I was born in 1988 – back in the days when the Internet didn’t have a graphical user interface and if you said ”Hyperlink” to someone they either thought you were a Trekkie or a Star Wars/Sci-fi fan.  When I was born I had grandparents, mothers and aunts all with cameras and I’ve got my share of ‘baby moments’ (yeah, there’s the obligatory “Hey, this is Daniel in the bath at 2 months old” shots – and back then you didn’t have to be a pedo to take shots of naked babies apparently).  Growing up, we’d go on trips with family and a month or two later they’d bring their photos with them when they had them developed and the parents would compare the best shots while us kids rated the ones they put down based on how stupid we’d managed to look in the photograph.

I’m thinking to myself now, weddings excluded, when the last time anyone went through a new bunch of digital photos in my family?  I think it was a year ago when my brother got back from Canada with pictures of himself in hospital.  Before that it was probably a year prior when my aunt visited America/Europe and took photos of the trip.  Beyond that, I got five photos of my family’s trip up the North Coast of Australia this year. 

You know what is worse?  People actually defend the digital camera “Oh, but they’re so convenient and easy!!!  So cheap to develop or keep on your computer to view whenever you want!  I can send them online to a photo shop and go pick them up instead of dropping off a canister!  I can touch up my own photos now and remove red-eye etc etc etc.”

Call me an old man, but back in my day when we used to have photos taken they actually got printed and you saw them.  I miss those days.  I keep looking at my photo on Facebook and go “Dude, that’s six months old and you took it yourself from your camera phone because there aren’t any others!”

I’d go so far as to say that amateur (family) photography was more common when I was born with that ancient and difficult technology than now with our ‘easy and cheap’ commodity.  The quality was also higher.  It was also easier to take family photographs – people knew you were paying for film and respected that money was being spent on their image.  When was the last time you had a family photograph?  Nowadays I’m reluctant to even bother considering I’ll never see the end result. 

However, I’m not here just to complain, I have some solutions as well.  The first solution is:

Be more free with your photographs (minus the naked baby shots) [Actually, don't even bother taking them, they're just awkward]

I understand that in this day and age there are such things as predators, so you don’t want your pictures falling into the wrong hands, but at the end of the day are you also going to lock your family in a cupboard with no lights and smash all cameras with flash enabled?  You walk into a park and any guy can randomly snap your photograph.  You walk through Queen St Mall and that tourist guy who’s snapping shots of the Commonwealth Bank and Government House?  He got you too.  That guy parked across the street who honked his horn waiting for his date?  Yep, smile and say cheese then tell your kids to go play out the back.  Paranoia – there is a cure. LIGHTEN UP!

Use technology to enable bulk photography emails

We all know “that guy” – you know, that dude who sends you the 10MB emails stuffed with photos of his cat, dog, wife, balls, whatever.  He failed his technology check, went directly to Gaol and did not pass Go or collect $200.  I met him in Gaol, and broke his camera over his head for being stupid.  Then I dug a hole in the ground with said camera and buried him up to his neck and forcefed him the rest of the camera.  I then showed him how with a quick program (http://www.getpaint.net/) you can open your files, modify their size, and save them as a JPEG with much lower size.

Do people even realise that they can send 800×600 photos at roughly 1ooKB’s per photo?  I attached a picture of my new WRX to this post below – click on it to see full size – it’s 89KB’s. 

For the previous guy sending 10MB emails, that’s 112 photos.  Yes, ONE HUNDRED AND TWELVE SHOTS!  The technology is there, it’s simple – took me about 15 seconds to convert that photo.  People are just failures at technology.  I’ll do a post next about how easy it is to convert a photo with Paint.NET.

Lastly, be careful

So we looked at the paranoid people and the technological failures – now I’m going to say my last bit today about digital photography.  Recently at work we had two companies lose their data because their backups were insufficient – you too could experience problems and lose your data.  It’s very important that you have backed up your photos somewhere else – if you sent them to other people via email this would be done “Hey Bob, please forward me back that email I sent you and you probably saved to your hard disk”.  If you used Hotmail it’d be in your sent items for you to recover by yourself.

I’m a hater of digital cameras :(