The Case of Missing Photos

Yesterday, when I opened my Facebook page, it showed me a photo on my timeline saying that it has been three years since that photo has been posted. It had a few likes and one comment. A thought struck me that I have never got any of my photographs printed in the last five years. Things were way different in my childhood.

I believe we still have that old black camera in our house. I don’t remember the company but it is the old black camera which makes a ‘click’ noise when you press that bindi-shaped red button on top. Back then, clicking a photograph was an event in itself. I remember seeing my mother open a small white cylinder box in which lay a snake curled black film. She used to insert it inside the camera and say that it has only 31 clicks and hence should use it rarely.

Photo Courtesy: Storebukkebruse

The camera was used very sparingly. We used to take photographs on our birthdays in newly bought dresses, when relatives visited our homes and when we occasionally went out for tours during the summer holidays in the month of May. When a film gets over, it would be handled to the studio nearby for developing the photographs. When the notebook shaped album arrives after two days the eagerness with which I skimmed through them is crystal clear in my memories.

I believe nobody visualized the meteoric transformation following the advent of digital devices. Today, most of us have mobile phones with an embedded camera. We click thousand times more pictures than what we used to do fifteen years ago. We have opportunities to record important moments of our lives but it is sad that these ‘photos’ have lost their importance.

This is partly because of the facility to take photographs easily and meaningless ‘selfies’ which spam our phones and mostly because of the availability of storage. Since so many photos can be stored in our devices, I believe we did not feel any urgency like a late-school-goer to print our pictures. But complacency can be costly too. During the last months in college, I asked my friend regarding the photographs which we have taken so far. He told me with a sad face that he has lost all of them when his hard drive got corrupted. Though it might not sound as a big loss I did regret that we did not care to print even one of them.

But we did make sure that we made copies of photographs which we shot in the last few months in college. In the last two days, I have been scanning them to isolate a few to get them printed so that I don’t regret as I did earlier. In those days, rarity gave photographs an eternal value. Today we click so many pictures but don’t pay attention to get a few printed.

Photo Courtesy: Fio

Photos are one the result of one of our greatest inventions not because of its utility but its ability to freeze time. If you haven’t even got a few printed in the last few years, select a few and get them done. Few things look better when you touch and feel them. Happy Pongal by the way. 

Photo Courtesy (External Link):

(1)Storebukkebruse

(2)Fio