Compliments of our little photographer daughter, Chloe!
The other day I let Chloe use our nice camera for the very first time. It’s an expensive camera and I didn’t want her to think it was a toy or something she could handle lightly, so she normally doesn’t get to touch it. But we were snuggling on the couch (this was the same night we took the silly pictures as a family, that I posted a while ago) and I thought it might be a good time for her to try. We explained how she would be able to use it and hang it around her neck etc. and this was the product. I don’t think it’s too bad for a 4 year old. 🙂 We bought her a cheap child’s camera for Christmas last year, but it takes really awful pictures. Most of them turn out blurry or dark. But it really doesn’t seem to slow her down though–she just loves capturing everything about everyday life. And, let me tell you, she takes pictures of EVERYTHING! Well, until the camera fills up and she has to wait for me to clear space… 🙂 Which usually takes a while for me to remember to do…
We live in a society with camera’s literally at our fingertips all the time. Virtually every phone now-a-days comes with a camera, and sometimes a pretty nice one! It’s interesting knowing she is going to grow up enveloped with so many pictures. Take me for example: I take pictures of vacations, new clothes, trips to the park, beautiful weather, funny signs, cute hair, yummy food, animals, flowers, carved pumpkins, and countless other things! It makes me wonder if the value of pictures will be less since there will be more of them around or if she’ll remember more from her childhood because it was captured “on film.”
Philosophical question, that. Does having a lot of something actually decrease its value? Pictures can be so many things, as you said – recollections of an important event, passage of time, as with children growing up, or just plain art that makes you happy to look at (which is mostly what I take nowadays.) When it cost a lot to develop pictures, we wouldn’t dream of trying to get the “perfect” picture of something, but now it is a hobby that is available to all of us. I love trying different angles and magnifications to catch something just perfectly, then I can throw away all the mistakes. And the value of pictures to keep families connected is just priceless. I can’t imagine being a grandma in the past and not being able to see my grandchildren almost every day through pictures. But that is all my perspective. The perspective of someone growing up with photography always so available will be different, I’m sure. But, like with any development, she will just be unable to imagine life where so much was expressed through words, when now we are totally a visual society, not to mention an “immediate” society.