Snapping away

Yesterday we had some spectacular swells off Kommetjie. After a prolonged period of mirror-like seas, it was invigorating to spend time at the rocks, watching the plumes of spray creating aerial art as the swells moved across the reefs that surround Kommetjie. A photographer was there with an incredibly fancy looking camera with a lens about 2 feet long, and I felt slightly embarrassed to be standing alongside him, clicking away randomly with my little cellphone, not even a smart phone! However, this phone takes all my photos and is of a standard not to be sneezed at, having a Zeiss lens, and its only fault is that the zoom feature is not great.

When I think back to the time of film, and how careful we had to be about every picture we took as we only had 12 or 36 frames available and then had to wait a few days for the film to be developed before we could see if they had been successful, it is easy to understand why we click away almost continually these days. Digital photography has enabled us to capture every last detail of every significant moment of our lives, even to the extent that we can make movies at the touch of a finger. How many of us have only a handful of photos of ourselves and our families when we were kids? The odd posed shot of us playing on the beach on a family holiday, or a lion under a faraway tree on a visit to the Kruger Park? Faded photos lying in the back of a drawer are the sum total of most of those memories.

I currently have more than 10 000 photos on my little notebook computer. Ok, on the chip in the notebook computer! Such a thing seemed inconceivable not too many years ago, and now they are also stored in a cloud computing system in case my computer crashes. For me, the inconceivable thing is trying to imagine where exactly all this information is. It's not physically anywhere, is it? But its storage depends on electricity, as far as I am aware, and this brings up the subject of what happens when the lights go out? There is no way to retrieve it then.

We would, I believe, in case of a fire, grab our photographs first. Perhaps we need to print those which are really, really important to us in case of loss of power? It may be an interesting exercise in de-cluttering!