Instagram is a photo sharing program which gained popularity so quickly Facebook had to buy it for $ 1 billion? This app has only been around for a couple of years, and almost immediately it had thousands of users. Currently, the numbers are in the millions. The irony of Instagram is that it puts a filter on your photos, and crops them to a 4 x 3 format so they look like Polaroid pictures. We use are cutting edge technologies to make something look vintage.
My family was talking about Polaroid cameras last week. They were pretty cool in their day. You were able to take a picture, and watch it develop before your eyes. Why don't we still have these cameras? Because, we can instantly see our digital pictures. No need to develop them. Our smartphones have become our Polaroid pictures. But, do we even look at our pictures anymore?
In our family, we have had digital cameras for five years. Yes, we were a little slow in embracing digital. We broke down when our daughter was about to be born. Before that, both my husband and I had film SLR cameras. We are quite avid photographers, and have plenty of albums in our home to prove it, but I have stopped printing pictures.
When I first got the digital camera, I would select the files I liked, and print my pictures. I would label the files on the computer with names and dates, so they would be easier to find. I would label the pictures I printed before putting them in the album. Now, I think it has been about two years since I printed a batch of pictures. We just have so many photo files. I can no longer choose which ones to print. I have no more room for photo ablums. There is no lack of visual documentation of our children, and the lives we now lead, but it is all stored digitally.
My kids like to flip through the physical albums we have. Luckily, I printed pictures of them as babies, so they get to see how much they have grown, and changed. How often to people sit down to their computer or, more likely, gather around their smart phone to look back at old pictures? I think this would even less fun than a slide show. There I go dating myself. Slides? No, not PowerPoint.
We say the new technologies will cut down on the amount of stuff we have, but now it's just all digital. Pictures, movies, music, games. We need more memory to store all this stuff, so more hard drives, and what happens if we lose it all. It would be like losing our stuff in a fire, but we could lose our digital legacy from the click of a mouse, a corrupted file, or the swipe of a finger.
We all have digital clutter, and it is only getting worse. Think of all those games you buy for your iPad, or phone when there is a $0.99 sale. We don't have enough time to play the games we download. Have you digitized all your music, movies, books? Will you listen, watch or read all of them? Our technologies have just enabled us to get different stuff, but there is still a lot of it in our lives, floating in the cloud, or on our hard drives. Maybe it's time to declutter.
PS tying in digital games and vintage stuff... My husband has been trying for years to find those water games where you push a button and the change in water pressure will toss rings on poles. He can't find them anywhere. So, he looked online, and there are digital versions available to play on your phone. This is me shaking my head.
PPS check out this neat project call Camera Obscura Project. There is a tie in with disposable film cameras. I heard about this from Spark on CBC. http://www.cameraobscuraproject.co.uk/.
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