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Jewish World Review Oct. 12, 2005 / 9 Tishrei, 5766 Digital camera despair By David Grimes
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
I don't know if I can pinpoint the exact moment when I realized I was hopelessly out of touch.
Perhaps it was when I witnessed a conversation where people were bandying about words like "blog" and "iPod" as casually as I might use "catarrh" and "Hupmobile."
Or maybe it was when I realized everyone in the world, except me, owns a picture phone and sustains frequent finger sprains doing something called "text-messaging."
And I'm going to tell you something now that will probably shock you to the point that you will spray hot coffee across the kitchen table in a manner made famous by Jackie Gleason in "The Honeymooners," the new season of which should be starting any day now:
I do not own a digital camera.
That's right, America. When I take a picture, or "photograph," as we used to call the things back when Eisenhower was calling the shots, I use a camera that is loaded with a spool of stuff called "film." When you used up your roll of film, you took it down to your friendly neighborhood Walgreens to be "developed" and within a week or so you'd get back a packet of blurry photographs of people missing the tops of their heads.
I don't know if you've noticed, but there is not a long line at Walgreens for this service nowadays.
But lest you think that I am hopelessly antediluvian, I once owned a digital camera. It was given to me as a Christmas present by a loved one who (rightfully) thought that popular American culture was passing me by like a cigarette boat might pass an iceberg. It was a disaster. The instruction manual, written in four languages, none of them English, was thicker than the camera, which looked like something you might get as a prize in a box of Rice Krispies.
There was much talk about "pixels," which I surmised were the genies that inhabited the interior of the camera and captured images as film would, only much more mysteriously.
The Great Leap Forward for digital cameras, of course, is that you can "download" your blurry pictures of people missing the tops of their heads to your computer, where they will be lost forever. To accomplish this, I needed, as I recall, six long wires, including the three-pronged orange extension cord that is usually reserved for Christmas lights. Because all the electrical outlets were taken up by the computer and its various accessories, the cord stretched from my office into the kitchen, requiring us not only to unplug the coffeemaker but also to bend over backwards, limbo-style, any time we needed to refresh our drinks, something we did quite often during those first halcyon hours of digital imaging.
I don't know where the digital camera is now. Probably in the garage with the crusted paint cans and the mud dauber nests and the various rusted drivers, wedges and putters that at one time promised to resurrect my golf game but only led me farther down the path of cynicism and dark despair.
When I take pictures now (which, admittedly, is not often due to the fact that my particular brand of portraiture is decreasingly in demand) I take them with an old 35-mm camera that I've had since college. (The raccoon coat, alas, is no more.)
The photos are not good, but I don't need an instruction manual or extension cords to get the job done.
And, quite frankly, I think the guy in the photo department at Walgreens is glad for the company.
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JWR contributor David Grimes is a columnist for The Sarasota Herald Tribune. Comment by clicking here. © 2005, Sarasota Herald Tribune |
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