Photographs are truly a time capsule. We are beginning what will be a long process of digitally scanning the thousands of pictures we have.
As I looked through the boxes today, I marveled at how far we have come in being able to capture and save images.
Depending upon your age, the following will either be a walk down memory lane or a history lesson where you can be amazed at how primitive things once were.
There are only a few pictures of my grandparents and those before them.
My father said a photographer came around once a year and took one or two family photos. But then they did not see them until the next year when he came back.
I remember growing up with limited pictures taken from my mother’s brownie box camera. They mailed the film to the Jack Rabbit Company to have them developed.
We got them back sooner than a year, but it was not right away. That Jack Rabbit was pretty slow.
As time went on, other companies were quicker at developing pictures. Years later, we were amazed when one hour processing came about. Wow! It was worth it to pay a little extra and get to see your pictures in just an hour.
However, since we were limited to just 12 or 24 pictures on a roll, it might be some time between taking picture number 1 and picture 24. Sometimes we could hardly wait to get the pictures developed because we had forgotten what we took pictures of at the beginning of the roll!
Somewhere in there came another truly amazing advancement. Polaroid pictures provided instant results. Take a picture. The camera instantly spit out the developed picture!
The only drawback was it was expensive. So again we could not afford to take too many pictures.
The limitation of the number of pictures we could take with either a camera roll or a Polaroid meant the pictures we did have were valuable.
People put them in scrapbooks with little pasted photo edges to keep them in place. Sometimes people would add captions.
In later years photo albums became more fancy. You could simply slide your pictures in to the pages without those little photo edges that always seemed to come unglued.
Many photo albums came with limited pages. So if you wanted to file more pictures, you had to buy more pages. This, of course, again limited what you could do with what you could afford.
Through all those years we never imagined there would come a time when we could reach in our pocket, pull out a phone, take as many pictures as we wanted, see them instantly and store them all on that same small device.
Not only that, we can get close up or distant pictures in amazing detail and vibrant colors.
We can share our pictures with others in a second.
If we don’t like the picture, we can delete it.
We can take videos in such sharp detail, it exceeds even the finest movies in theaters of long ago.
If we ever wished for a Time Machine, we are well on the way to being there. Photographs have always allowed us to capture and relive moments that will never come again.
If there has been this much advancement in the relatively short period of our life, we can’t even imagine what will come next.
I wonder if our four year old grandson may look at all this one day and be telling his children, “Back when I was growing up, people did not even know they could choose a picture of anywhere in the world and push a button and be there.”
Anything is possible! 😘
