Living in the Digital Age

I've been scanning a lot of 35mm slides from my early years which predate digital photography and it has got me really appreciating the current era.

I'm in the process of creating Facebook photo albums of my early travels and I'm putting myself back in those shoes and it's incredibly frustrating.

Today the photo album was my Middle East trip when I was 17 and I was so disappointed that the only photo of me in Petra, Jordan was blurry. Had digital cameras been around, I could have had several shots taken until I had a good one.

There's also the upcoming European photo album in which I have a great photo of an older gentleman on a train in Switzerland smoking a pipe. He agreed to let me take his photo if I'd send him a print. So I had to get his mailing address, have a print made when I got home, and send it to him.

Good Lord, don't we have it easy these days? Now, he'd probably have an email address or a Facebook page, I could take the photo, upload to my page, and send him a digital print in a matter of seconds.

Film was also weird because I'd come home from a trip and have an unfinished roll in my camera. It might be 3 months before I'd shoot up the last 8 or 10 photos on the roll, send it off to be developed, and then get the slides back in the mail.

We have it so easy these days.

Photography has been a beneficiary. Not so sure about music.