Travel Photography: From Shoeboxes to Clouds

Hey kids, grab a seat – I have a story to tell you.

Back when we were young, in the 80s and early 90s, when you returned from a trip one of the first things you would do would be to take your rolls of film down to the drugstore to get them developed. Some places could develop them within 24 hours – which would give us time to take our dirty clothes from the trip down to the crick and rub ’em down real good on the hand scrubber.

Next day we’d head back to the drugstore to pick up our photos – they put ’em in nice envelopes and stuck the negatives in there too in case you wanted copies later. We’d flip through them and find out then and there which ones came out good and which ones weren’t worth keeping. Sometimes an entire roll of 12 or 24 photos was ruined because we had removed it incorrectly from the camera.

But if it was a big trip we would probably have taken three or four rolls of photos, so you might still have a good 20-50 photos from the trip – some of which had even come out pretty good. You threw a few in a photo album, and the rest in a shoebox.

Fast forward to today. After his most recent 5-day cruise, dvdkndy noticed that he had taken over 1,200 photos! In this CruiseCritic thread he is curious to know if his photo inventory from this trip would be considered excessive by other travelers.

Digital cameras have literally changed the way we view the world, but there is one thing I miss about the old film days – the long forgotten and still undeveloped roll of film. Finding the old roll at the bottom of a sock drawer or in an old piece of luggage was like finding a time capsule with unknown treasures hidden inside.

Ah for the good ‘old days. And we can only imagine what the future might hold. Maybe everyone will be wearing Google glasses and recording to the cloud their entire life from a first-person perspective.

Now if you will excuse me, I’m running late for my afternoon nap appointment.

Image by Bilby (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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