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Can you take too many pictures?
I just uploaded about 200 pictures from my phone, mostly of Leo. That's not to mention the 1,000 pictures on my wife's phone, and Lord only knows how many are on the phones belonging to my two teenage stepdaughters.
Oh, and then there are the cameras.
I'd say that in the seven months since Leo was born, his picture has been taken an average of about 20 times a day.
How many baby pictures do you have from your childhood? I think I have about a dozen. Maybe. Okay, more than that, but not really all that much.
Pictures used to be special, remember? They took preparation, a little luck, and time to develop. Hours, if you were lucky. Days, more likely.
Polaroids were called "instant" cameras because you could see the picture within minutes of taking it. There was even a delete option: it was called the trash can, but you never wanted to throw the picture out because, no matter how lousy it was, the film cost so much that you didn't want to admit you screwed up.
Could you imagine waiting minutes to see the pictures you just took? Or not being able to delete a blurry image or one you just don't like?
Let's face it: We're spoiled. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I don't want to go back to the days of educated guesses and crossing fingers, hoping the picture came out okay, condemned to wait hours or days before knowing for sure.
But I have to admit that I'm concerned for Leo and for the girls. Flooded by photographs of themselves, will they ever appreciate them? They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but what are a thousand pictures worth?
Considerably less, I fear.
Gretchen Day-Bryant has a son in high school and a daughter in middle school. She’s lived to tell about the struggles of juggling little kids and work...
Joy Oglesby has an infant daughter and a sister 13 years her junior, whom she babies to the now-adult...
Cindy Kent Fort Lauderdale mother of three. Her kids span in ages from teenager to 20s...
Rafael Olmeda and his wife welcomed their first son in Feb. 2009, and he's helping raise two teenage stepdaughters...
Lois Solomon lives in Boca Raton with her husband and three daughters...
Anne Vasquez is the Online Editor in charge of overseeing SunSentinel.com. She is the mother of a 5-year-old boy and a newborn daughter.
Georgia East is the parent of a five-year-old girl, who came into the world weighing 1 pound, 13 ounces...
Brittany Wallman is the mother of Creed, 13, and Lily, 6, and is married...
Chris Tiedje is the Social Media Coordinator, and father of two boys and a girl all under the age of seven.
Comments
No.
My parents have a small number pictures of me and my siblings from when we were kids. I would gyess less than 100. I wish there were more, but things were different then.
I I have two kids between the ages of 2 and 4 and we have thousands of pictures of them. We don't take pictures every day. Usually just on vacation or special occasions, but I can easily take hundreds of pictures of them during a vacation.
And why not take as many pictures as you want? When I was a kid the only thing that stopped us from taking more pictures was (1) the cost of film and (2) the cost of developing the pictures. Now, for the cost of what one roll of film with 24 exposures used to cost, you can take hundreds or thousands of pictures. And we do not print all the pictures we take. We print some for friends and family and some for us. But mostly we enjoy them as "slideshows" on our TV -- like we used to watch slides on a projector when I was a kid.
I have a media player (Western Digital HD TV Media player) that attaches to any portable USB hard drive or flash drive. It hooks up to the TV and plays any photos, videos or audio that you put on the drive. So, I can just take my SD card holding my pictures out of the camera, plug it into a USB adapter, plug the adapter into the WDTV and - viola! Instant picture slide show. I even take very good quality movies with my digital camera (Canon S5-IS) that I record to the SD Card (I have a couple of 16 GB Class 6 SDHC cards that can hold several hours of video each). Just as with the pictures I can play the video immediately on our TV, without having to download the video to my computer to burn to a DVD and without having to play it through the camera.
I can't tell you how much my kids love being able to see their pictures and video right away. They enjoy seeing themselves in the pictures and video more than their favorite TV shows.
Posted by: Joe | September 24, 2009 3:25 PM
But didn't the fact that there were so few pictures in the past make each picture more valuable? And does that value lessen when you have hundreds of pics to choose from?
Posted by: Rafael | September 24, 2009 4:11 PM
It certainly made the few pictures more memorable because there were so few. As far as them being more "valuable", I would agree that from the standpoint of them being irreplaceable, because there are so few pictures, then sure, they were more "valuable" because losing one picture would be a big loss.
But I'd still rather have all the pictures I have of my kids than only have a hand-full of them. I don't necessarily have to look at all the pictures. I make slideshows that may take the best few pictures from a particular outing / vacation, etc.
But I'd still rather have more pictures than less.
Posted by: Joe | September 24, 2009 4:57 PM
It's nice to have the pictures but the constant taking of the pictures can be obsessive. Instead of enjoying the game or party or vacation the event has to be recorded, which for me interferes.
My kids are a older (19,17,14) and as much as I enjoyed their earlier years, I rarely look back.
Then again maybe down the road I will wish I had more pictures.
Posted by: dave2 | September 26, 2009 6:19 PM