How safe are your memories?
I recently tried to sell my mother, the recently-minted grandmother of a one-year-old (my niece), on the idea that she should be taking photographs of her granddaughter with a film camera. My idea was that if she were to spend $60-100 for camera X, I would lend her very nice lenses Y and Z that I never use (including a Nikkor 105/2.5, if that means anything to you) and she would be able to take some lovely, natural light images of her granddaughter that would distinctively memorialize their visits.
Her response: "Jeez, there are so many photos of [her] available that I don't have a great urge to take more."
I couldn't argue that that there are a lot of photos of her available. Most of them are digital record shots taken indoors with flash that I am not sure will be around in 20 years, but it's true that there are lots of them. Rather than insist, I went back to dangling the same offer in front of a friend who already favors film for shots of her kids. She might yet take me up on this.
Soon after the exchange with my mother, I saw a segment on Nightline about how the advent of digital cameras and editing programs is increasingly enabling average people to take "perfect pictures." Then I read an article in the New York Times about the often absurd shutter lag of consumer digicams. This piece opened with typical NYT digicam fawning—"Digital cameras are amazing"—and then went on to detail issues that would ruin the experience of any serious person trying to use one these sluggish cameras.
All this made me think about the several new parents I know who, while keeping the many balls of new parenthood aloft, have been memorializing their children with consumer digicams. It's the easiest thing to do, of course. I have already explained some of the reasons that I think this is a bad approach that both the parents and the children will be sorry about later, but I recognize that it's what most people are going to do. So I thought I would come up with a few suggestions and considerations about recording your child's life with a consumer digicam.
- Try covering your camera's flash window with a piece of frosted cellophane tape or the frosted part of a Post-It tape flag. This will moderate and diffuse your flash and make your flash photos look somewhat better. You will likely decide to leave the covering in place permanently.
- Experiment with pretending that your camera does not have a flash, a display screen or a delete button. Be alert for opportunities to shoot without flash. Compose your shots with the camera's optical viewfinder and pretend that you won't have the opportunity to review them later. Pretend that you have limited storage and need to make every shot count.
- Treat photography partly as a separate activity, not only as an adjunct to everything else. Take advantage of overcast days to go outside and get some shots with diffuse natural light. Plan photos in the shade or natural light. Try to get some candid shots with your child's attention focused elsewhere than on the photographer.
- Consider the distinct possibility that if you have given no thought to how your digital images will be perpetuated in a viewable form over decades, that in itself may be an indication that they will not be. I think about my own college papers, the earliest of which I completed more than 20 years ago. I didn't give much thought to how I would be able to read the files in the future, and now it would take an extreme effort to read them. They are on 5-1/4" floppy disks, in WordPerfect for MS-DOS format. They are for most practical purposes already gone. I think the photos you are taking of all these irretrievably precious moments are likely to suffer the same fate. Some might not, most will, and your lack of any kind of plan makes it very likely that I will be proven right. So shoot some film.
Labels: film cameras, if only they would listen to MWR, parenting
posted at 1:56 PM
1 Comments:
Interesting points, and I am thinking about changing some of my ideas about photographs of grandchildren. Thanks for being one of the best blogs when it comes to advice on such matters.
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