Photographs: Then & Now

A needle in a haystack.  One in a million.  The perfect storm.  Of all the gin joints in all the towns, in all the world, she has to walk into mine.  What are the odds that before you die, you'll hold in your hand that one perfect photograph that triggers the perfect rush of sentimental memories that last a lifetime?  Luckily I beat those odds and I have one of those photos.  If you own a digital camera, you probably do too.

For those of us who are parents, we are lucky enough to live two lifetimes.  We have our own memories as children, and then we live through our own children's memories.  I have few precious photographs from my childhood, no film footage at all, and as for video technology, well that hadn't been invented yet.  I miss my childhood.  I remember being happy, but I yearn  for photographs that will transport me back in time.  Every once in a while, I crave for visual evidential reminders of how happy I was back then.  Of all the gin joints in all the towns, ours didn't have any digital cameras.

Nowadays, with the likes of Facebook and Flickr, our digital images populate and repopulate the worlds of our families, our friends and our acquaintances.  Our personal libraries of digital photographs overflow.  And this worries me.  In a world of abundance, things lose value.  Although we have become a society immersed in digital images, let us remember that these digital memories are not a cheap commodity. 

I am not a professional photographer, and my camera is old and outdated; but it is digital and that makes all the difference in the world.  The laws of mathematics are quite wonderful, and odds are if you take enough photographs, the likelihood is that you too will eventually have hanging on your wall that one shot, that one moment in time, that represents all that is good and right in your world.  As parents from the baby boom generation living in this modern digital world, how lucky are we to be given a second chance.  Cherish these swelling numbers of photographs sitting on your hard drives, and don't take them for granted.