The Marvellous March of Technology
Monday, November 17th, 2008
Amateur photography is one area of the digital revolution that didn’t suffer the same take-no-prisoners approach of the big media companies towards music and video. And we’re all better off for it. On our three week overseas trip we took a total of 951 photographs. Pre-digital, we would have been talking about having to purchse and then pay to develop 40 rolls of 24-photo film.
One of the joys of digital photography is that it allows for opportunistic photos like these:
Kate took the photo of this kid who was on the six hour flight from Washington to San Francisco with the rest of his family. He couldn’t have been more than two-and-a-half. His mum had gotten up to go to the bathroom and left him watching his portable DVD player. Funny thing was every now and then the kid would tap the thing like it was a keyboard.
And the morning after I took a photo of this:
We stopped in for breakfast at this great little diner and the whole time we were there this old guy was using his iPhone. And he was a pro - resizing websites on the fly with the pinch technique and tapping away at e-mails.
But it all got me thinking about how different things would have been 10 years ago. While some people might have had a digital camera, I didn’t. And there weren’t any portable DVD players or iPhones around to take cute pictures of. But even if they were - if I was using a camera where I’d paid $4 for film and another chunk of change to develop I may not have taken either .
But because I have a digital camera and there are plenty of portable DVD players and iPods around I could take a picture of them without concern I was “wasting” film, copy them to my laptop and blog about it all.
Ain’t technology grand.
