Thursday, December 17, 2020

Save Christmas with Your Camera - weekly column

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Save Christmas with Your Camera

 

Your children will never show their childhood Christmas pictures to their own children because the pictures won’t exist.

 

Decades ago Kodak, once a great American corporation, boosted their sales of cameras for Christmas with the slogan, “Open Me First.” The ads featured images of perfect families with perfect teeth grinning for the new Kodak camera that someone opened first.

 

After the Second World War Americans took lots of pictures, especially during the holidays, and the drug-store prints and the film negatives found their way into albums and shoeboxes, often to be rediscovered and reprocessed decades later.

 

Today there are steady but slow sales of film cameras and films, because artists and many professional photographers insist that film provides a depth, a richness that for portraiture and art pieces cannot be matched by digital.

 

But most people do not own film cameras and, less and less, digital cameras. Almost all family photography is accomplished on MePhones, and two flaws obtain: (1) the MePhone microprocessors simply can’t compensate for the lack of glass, that is, a real lens, and (2) the pictures are usually lost within months.

 

MePhones are notorious for their built-in obsolescence, and if by mistake a company makes a MePhone that lasts for a few years, recent lawsuits reveal that some manufactures find ways of making them decay so that you have to buy a new one. When the old is traded in for the new, sometimes the pictures are not saved.

 

Beyond that, MePhones and computers are lost or stolen or simply cease to work, and the pictures you meant to save to an external drive never get there.

 

For your children someday to re-visit all their Christmases and adventures you need a camera, a real camera, not one that is tacked onto Maxwell Smart’s shoe ‘phone.

 

The remaining camera manufacturers – none of them American – make nifty little digital cameras that take superior photographs and feature easily changed memory cards.  You will have far better photographs and can share them by connecting the camera to your computer or sometimes plugging in the memory card.

 

Most importantly, take out the memory card with all the Christmas and New Year’s pix, label it, and store it in your safety deposit box at the bank. Your children’s Christmases and graduations and ball games will be safe there for many years (if you bought a quality card – this is not the time for bargains).

 

And, after all, your children laughed at your childhood pictures, so would you want to deprive your grandchildren the opportunity to laugh at their parents’ childhood pictures? I thought not.

 

For artistic work you can still find film cameras new, but a better deal is to hit the garage sales and find a bargain with which to experiment.

 

And whatever happened to Kodak? Well, they invented the digital camera, decided there was no future in it, fumbled the patents, fell into bankruptcy, and destroyed thousands of jobs and the economy of Rochester, New York. Would you like to be remembered as one of the board-room alligator-shoe boys who let that happen?

 

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