Kodak Moments

So while I was snapping pictures in the den closet yesterday, I bumped into these:

I’m not a scrapbooker. Actually, I would love to be one. It looks fun to me, but I never have taken that particular plunge. I’m not a photo album gal either. Oh, I own them. I just never put my pictures in them. Instead, my old pictures live in that little colorful mountain of photo boxes… behind that door in that den closet. They are boxed by year and further filed by season, sometimes by event.

And I have a ton of them.

Because even in the pre digital era, I was that annoying photo op mom with a camera super glued to her fingers. You know the type. Of course, those were the pose- freeze - hold it days… the let me take another shot just in case your eyes were closed days… the days when you weren’t sure how a photo would turn out until you had it developed. I wonder if this new generation of digital moms knows just how blessed they are. They get to capture their children in candid, real life moments and not worry about wasting a shot to do it. I envy them.

Way back when, I never wasted a shot by taking a picture of an object or a landscape. Instead, I posed the girls in front of said object or landscape. No matter how grand the canyon, it was really nothing more than the setting of that chapter in the Princess Chronicles anyway.

Here's the Great Smokey Mountains.... behind my girls...

And that's the Mighty Mississippi River... behind my girls...

Some random water wheel in Florida.... behind my girls.... during the prairie bonnet phase...

Look! An entire century.... behind my girls...

And back then, I kept the one hour photo mart in business. When I hit that 24th exposure, regardless of whether it had taken me a month to reach that point, I simply could not contain myself for more than an hour before seeing my masterpieces developed.

So I would drive (because back then, photo developing actually involved legwork…) to the photo mart, leave my film, and then fritter away an hour somewhere in town waiting to pay entirely too much money for the big reveal. Apparently, frugality and photography were diametrically opposed on Debbie Drive...back then.

What a difference technology makes! Now, I snap a few (hundred) pictures, plug the shiny red Kodak into my laptop, and voila, instant gratification and mass production. It doesn’t get any better than that.

That’s why when Cinderella went to the ball last year, I was able to shoot and upload 52 photos of the event and turn 20 of them into a slideshow, complete with witty captions… which I then sent through cyber space to various locations around the globe. All before the clock struck midnight.

It was grand.

Nowadays, I store my pictures in this little computer… in folders, of course. I’m not sure how much memory I have in this little laptop, but I’m pretty sure that at some point it will develop dementia from the overload. Until that time, I will continue to point, click, and hoard.

Because I’m still a hovering, card carrying member of the parental paparazzi.