Digital Cameras

It seems like so long ago that we had to take the film out of our cameras to be developed. Often whatever was on the beginning of the roll had been completely forgotten. Oops, that birthday party was six months ago! One didn't take very many shots (unless you were a National Geographic photographer) because of the cost of processing. The worst result of this was that there was no second or third chance if the focus was off or someone blinked or the top of her head was chopped off.

Our digital camera is cute and pocket-sized. I can be profligate and take many shots of the same subject.  It is so easy to download the pictures to the computer; the program keeps everything sorted into events and labeled by date and time. I can add comments, so that down the road we remember the "who" and "where" of our photos. I can alter the exposure if it comes out too dark or light. This came in handy with the snow pictures I have taken the last two winters because the camera averaged everything out, making the snow rather dingy. It is easy to crop the photos or straighten the tilted ones.

Best of all we can print out lovely color photos at any copy center (our home printer doesn't do that). Yesterday I printed a picture from our trip to Glacier National Park in 2006. This is the reference photo for a watercolor painting I am just beginning. Nothing digital about that endeavor!

I have heard it argued that the photographer's art has been debased by easy-to-use cameras. There are high-end digital cameras for those who love to play with depth of field and the other subtleties of photography, but to me the blessing of our little camera is that it requires hardly any twiddling of dials or fuss to do its job.  The "instant" photo above does just a fine job of taking me back in memory to this exquisite vista at the end of an exciting walk across a snowfield, high in a pass. We even saw mountain goats (a pretty big blessing in itself!)