You should see the photos of my cousin’s 1984 hair.
That’s me and some other kid in 1984. I’ve always loved that photo. Whenever I look at it, I think, If only I could get back into a wheelbarrow FULL OF GRAPEFRUITS. Everything would be okay if I was sitting on top of a wheelbarrow full of grapefruits.
My dad’s been scanning and uploading old family photos to his Flickr account. There was piece on CNN recently about the new trend in obsessive digital documentation of one’s children; as something of a compulsive photographer, however, I personally am not too worried about “fail[ing] to enjoy living in the moment.” I like to take pictures; it’s part of my enjoyment of some moments. I do get annoyed when I’m not IN any of the pictures, which is why it’s good that in my family, both my father and I take a lot of photos. It’s always a danger, when you have one documentary photo taker in a group, that they disappear almost entirely from the photographic record.
The article also panics over the possibility that photo formats could change; formats are always an issue with digital media, but I doubt we’re going to wake up one morning to discover that all of a sudden, .jpgs no longer work. Batch conversion is a pretty simple job these days. And while it may be true that “some parents buy additional disk drives to archive photos, burn them on CDs or keep copies online — not always mindful that photo sites often make it difficult to retrieve the original, high-resolution versions necessary for quality prints,” it costs $25 a year for a FlickrPro account that WILL retain the original high-res versions, and you can also order prints of photos you upload to Flickr, either for pick-up at Target or to have shipped directly to you. A lot of the problems that the tech news people like to focus on are really “less advanced user” problems, which you know, they could actually address with helpful tips.
It may, however, be worth considering that publicly available photos on Flickr and other photo-sharing sites really are available to “the entire world.” One of the photos my father put up featured my sister and me in the bathtub in 1984. It got 11 views in about a third of a day. It did apparently have “bath” in the title, and I’m pretty sure that the pedophiles are a heavily networked community, so I guess only one of them has to stumble on a particular photo to start it on the rounds. Dad set it to friends only.
Yes, I have always had freaky hair.
September 30th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
ADORABLE
October 1st, 2007 at 5:51 am
No, you have always had CUTE hair, at least judging by those photos. Me, I have always had pretty much the same hair, with or without fringe.
I know what you mean about the photographer not appearing in any photos. J and I both took cameras on our last holiday, and as a result have almost no photos of us together.
My mother has a photograph of the three of us in the bath IN THE DINING ROOM. Where all our friends could see it during our teenage years. My brother’s friends still bring this up…
As for the digital formats: no, we’re not going to wake up tomorrow to find JPGs no longer work, but the question is discussed a lot in archive circles at the moment, and that might be where the journalist gets it from.
It’s possibly not so much the file format as the medium: many computers today don’t have disk drives, whereas a few years ago that would have been surprising. What happens when you find an old CD-ROM, maybe with photos on it, at the bottom of a drawer 20 years from now, and your computer no longer has something which will read it (or even tell you if the disc’s still readable?) You might well have a graphics program on there that will read legacy formats, but it’s not much good if you can’t get at the files in the first place.
Oversimplification, but you get the idea.
October 1st, 2007 at 6:29 am
I’m not sure how negatives are any better than digital as far as archiving goes. Especially now that major film companies are phasing out a lot of film types. If you subscribe to the idea that technology will eventually eat it’s parents, it will be just as hard to get a print from a colour negative as it will be to pull one from a CD-rom when your disk drive has spun its last.
The idea of inaccessible data is ridiculous to me though. Because there is always going to be some specialist service (just as there are currently for processing high-end monochrome film or reachieving microfiche) to get your information for you. Its not going to be a question of how, it’s going to be a question of cost and ultimately whether or not it is worth it.
Maybe the parents of these kids should consider the waste they’re creating for their children to clean up. Isn’t it bad enough that there are landfills all over the earth filled to the brim with AOL subscription CDs? :p
October 1st, 2007 at 8:35 am
I really ought to scan and post some pictures of the she-mullet I had as a kid. I have one picture where I’m supposedly dressed up like a cat for halloween, but, I swear, I’m really dressed up as let’s-get-physical era Olivia Newton John. But in my defense, it *was* the 80’s and that was at least semi-cool.
October 1st, 2007 at 6:34 pm
Yeah, there aren’t a lot of pictures of me during much of our family history, because I took most of the pics. And yes, Paige’s big 1984 hair is pretty funny now.
October 2nd, 2007 at 1:56 pm
Cute.