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?
-30-
