Old pictures

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

Both of my sons have birthdays coming up later this month.

My youngest son will turn 27 next Monday, while my oldest will turn 29 on the 26th.

Coincidentally, I was doing some early Spring cleaning over the weekend and I came across a big box of old photos. Most of our family pictures are in frames or photo albums but there is this big ol’ cardboard box with hundreds of “loose leaf” pictures in it.

You see, technology has really changed how we capture these family moments. Back in the day, you’d take some pictures with your camera (I think our most trusted family camera was a Kodak 110). Then, you’d wait until you had a bunch of rolls of film (Film? What’s “film,” right?) saved up and take them to Walmart or Walgreens or wherever to get them developed.

See VIEWPOINT, page A6 VIEWPOINT

From page A4

Then came digital cameras.

No more film to fool with , and you could take as many pictures as you wanted. And so we got a digital camera — and we used it! So, from around 2002 to 2010, we had a bunch of SD cards full of family photos (that now included our daughter). But they were just that… digital images.

So, one year, for Christmas for my wife, I went through all of those thousands of digital images and picked out the best 1,000 I could find and had them printed out at Walgreens. I then put them all in that cardboard box I mentioned earlier and on Christmas morning, she had a chance to watch her kids grow up all over again.

Well, technologt changed again several years ago. Now everyone has largely ditched cameras altogether and instead captures memorable moments on their cell phones.

In fact, we have a couple of old phones in a dresser drawer from the pre-iPhone era that we are holding onto simply because of the pictures on them.

So, now we have thousands of digital phone pics from the past 10 or 15 years that my wife wants to go through and get printed out, which is cool I guess. But here’s the funny thing. She wants to print them out so that we can have “real photos,” but she also wants me to take all of the actual printed photos we have and scan them into digital form so we can preserve them in case of a fire or tornado or whatever… sigh. I saw one time that when there’s a housefire, the first thing the arson investigator looks at is whether or not the family pictures were left hanging on the walls. Apparently, that’s a tell-tale sign that someone knew the fire was going to happen.

Well, fire won’t be getting our family photos, because they’ll be in digital and print… and probably somewhere on “the cloud” for safe measure.”

Just in case…