Say Cheese! (The problem with digital perfection)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

The other day my mom-in-law hands me a box of photos she found of Mr Baboon as a baby. Lovely pictures and all, but it made me think…

In this day we all pretty much have digital cameras. One of the best features, it seems, is that you can instantly erase bad pictures. Only the pretty ones survive. Blinky-face photos never see the light of day any more.

Looking through this box of pictures, I noticed quite a few ‘bad’ pictures. Pictures where the subject (a mini Mr Baboon) was out of focus, a picture of a table leg, a picture with people’s heads out of the frame, people making “I’m not ready” faces, that sort of thing. In a way, they sparked more conversation than the perfect shots (hey, who in your family drank Sanka? or “That is one impressive shag rug your parents had”). The pretty pictures you speed through, the bad ones are like stop signs or at the very least, speed bumps.

I found these to be really fascinating. They made me pay more attention to the background because the subject was not the focus (pun intended). I also think that in some cases, the mistake shots say more about the subject than the perfect ones, you know? They add a bit of personality a plastered-on smile fails to capture.

Just thought you might want to think about that the next time you hit the delete button on your digital camera. You never know what you might be erasing.

2

So true. I’ve also deleted perfectly good shots when my memory card filled up. And I’ve lost several entire sets of pictures when various harddrives have failed over the last 5 years.

But my fiancee has shoeboxes full of old photos, and she much prefers looking at those to my digital pics on the TV screen. I bought a pretty decent photo printer, but almost never use it.

It seems to me like film is still the best option for photos you want to show your grandkids.

3

Good point.

Once, when a bunch of my friends were taking a professional, yearbook style group shot, I caught them (with a digital camera, actually) in between shots, when they weren’t trying to smile or anything, they were just being themselves. It’s a GREAT picture.

4

I don’t have a digital camera. And I have loads of bad pictures. :smiley:

5

Getting pictures back from being developed is great. It’s like opening presents, you might have some idea what’s in there but you don’t really know until you open it up.

The upside to digital cameras is that you don’t end up with 20 something pictures of the inside of your lens cap.

Whenever me and the wife are doing something/going somewhere where we will be taking a lot of pictures, we take a regular and a digital camera. So we still get plenty of surprises, and we get the shots we definately want.