What Will Our Photos Look Like Someday?

If you’ve been paying attention to my posts, you know that Jack and I have recently become interested in photography.  We purchased our new Nikon SLR right after Evie was born, and we haven’t stopped fiddling with it yet.  Children are perfect subjects—albeit, quick ones—so we’ve had lots of fodder for photos.

But I’ve been wondering…what will our photos look like someday?  It’s been so long since I actually printed out any photos that I’ve almost forgotten that you can actually do that.  Sadie’s baby scrapbook is updated all the way through the weeks right after we brought her home from the hospital, and Abbie and Evie’s books?  Non-existent.  Not that I don’t have good intentions and all, but those are acting as paving stones to somewhere right now.

Will our future photos be relegated to a disc?  We’ll call our friends over and say, “Hey, check out this disc to see the photos from our vacation?”  Better yet, maybe in the future we can just download pictures and images straight into our brains, thereby skirting the issue of tangibility altogether.

I don’t know.  There’s something so science-y, so futuristic about all the wonderful and creative things you can do with photography today, but I’m one of those people who insists on reading real, touch-with-your-hands books, getting my daily dose of news from the inky, fallible newspaper.  I’ve looked into those Kindle book-reader things, and, although the techie in me is fascinated and I love the concept of portability, somehow I just can’t imagine doing all my reading with it.  Sitting up in bed at night with the little light shining out at me, screwing up my laser-improved eyesight by staring at yet another computer screen, getting my fix of science fiction (my recent book-lust) or trying to read Pride and Prejudice for the first time ever.  (Yes, I’m a bad, bad English teacher; I know.)  How do you mark a page when you are ready to turn in for the night?  And the feel of the pages in your hand?  I’ve always told Jack that if I ever publish any of those seventy-nine novels that are swimming around in my head, I want the books to have those jagged page edges.  The kind where you look at them from the side and they are like little hills and valleys.  That kind of pages.  They have texture, and they lend the reader to a more intimate experience with a book.  And I love it when I check out a book from the library and find other readers’ leftover check-out receipts or little crumbs in the book (gross, huh?)—those are signs that a book has been read, digested (pun intended), loved.

And photos with crinkles?  Spots?  Scratches?  Pinholes?  Same thing.  Those photos show the ages, the love that people felt for the images expressed.  You can tell which photos were the most appreciated and the most viewed in my collection of pictures from my childhood because of all those little holes poked in the edges with stick-pins.

So I guess if other people feel the same way that I do, it’s no wonder that there has been a prominent theme in recent photography styles and editing techniques.  I recently downloaded a bunch of Photoshop Actions—most from Pioneer Woman’s website here—and quite a few of them are created and titled to emphasize a move toward the old, the retro, and the vintage.  They come with titles like “Vintage,” “Seventies,” “Colorized” (like a black and white photo that has been hand-colorized), “Heartland,” “Soft and Faded,” “Old West,” and “Black and White Beauty.”  Their effect has to be used sparingly, only on the right photographs, but they represent a return to those old photographs that were taken when you had no editing software or post-production capabilities.  Nearly every one of the photos my father took of my brother and me when we were growing up looks exactly like that “Seventies” treatment:  hazy, dreamy, warm and ochre-y, sort of faded and washed-out.  No, it’s not magazine quality clarity or color, but it gives a pronounced feeling to the photograph, thereby impressing the same feeling onto the image.

So, what will my girls’ pictures look like twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now?  Will there be some amazing, technologically advanced space-shipish method of capturing moments?  Will anyone still have photo albums sitting up in their attics, collecting dust?

Will there even be such a thing as an attic then?

Will there even be such a thing as dust?

Sure would make my weekly chore list a lot lighter, I’ll tell you that.

photo from flickr/creative commons by anyjazz65

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