Film and Paper
Click! Everybody is a photographer since cell phones include pretty good cameras and sharing is a poplar aspect of digital photography. Sharing is not new. My grandmother shared images with a Texas cousin she never met. Both were born in 1888 and died a year apart. They shared letters, greeting cards and photographs throughout their lives. My grandmother deeply regretted they never met.
Oddly, I'm in contact with Cousin Jimmie Jewell McClure's grandson, and we've never met either, but we swap notes and pictures.
Most of the iconic video on the evening news was not shot by a news videographer but by people with cell phones.
Whether the video is of a fight in a restaurant or a spat on an airplane, mobile phones are ubiquitous, and everyone is packing a camera. If something unusual happens, people reach for their cell.
Since a mobile phone is on the “minimum equipment list” for teenagers, the school house is one big movie set.
When the news shows a visit from a personage or celebrity, everyone is watching things unfold on the tiny screen of their mobile phone. I think they're missing something of the event.
Sure, digital photography is convenient, but my main complaint is that digital images are volatile: It is too easy for digital images to vanish — poof. It is for certain that the digital images on your phone will not exist in a hundred years unless their survival is assured.
There has been a method of preserving photo images, and up until a few years ago all photographs appeared on paper.
Scores of family images trickled down to me. Most are on paper and many are on a sheet of tin known as a “tin-type.”
Tintypes were popular in the mid 1800's and gave way to paper prints in the late 1800's. Some of them required a long exposure, sometimes in minutes.
Some studio sittings offered a head rest to assist the subject in keeping still. It was rare for someone's likeness to show a smile because they are brutal to hold for any length of time. The oldest picture I have was taken in the 1840's and is an image of poor quality, but with some tweaking of a scanned copy, it is decent. It is better than not having one.
The picture of my oldest direct relative is Nathan Lusk Keown, my 3X great-grandfather, as a mature young man. His hair and beard appear free of gray, and since he was born in 1815, that would place the image perhaps within a few years of 1845-1850.
Photo buffs drifted away from film and paper, but they are drifting back in the same way that vinyl recordings are hot among audiophiles who want a warmer sound.
I get it. I still have my film cameras.
joenphillips@yahoo.com
Nathan Lusk Keown
