A Kodak Moment

I remember a time when I thought film was magic. The ideal that I could push a button on a camera to open a shutter, forming an invisible image on a strip of coated plastic, then making that image visible by bathing that image in chemicals and making that image appear on paper was shear magic.
Now I still press a button on the Kodak camera I often carry, but it is a digital image that appears instantly on the camera's LCD screen. In a few seconds I can transfer the picture to my Dell laptop computer, crop it or change it with photo editing software and then email it anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes.
The sentimentalists in me sometimes wants things to be like they used to be and to hell with all those instant photos. I don't know at what age I took my first picture but is was around 45 years ago. Back then just loading film into a camera was a chore. I always seem to screw up the first and last picture because I exposed the film as I was loading and unloading the film to and from the camera. One had no ideal if the pictures would turn out ok. There was no cropping or changing the photos in any way. The drugstore developed your pictures just the way you took them, you paid for the bad exposures as well as the good ones. That's right I said the drugstore, it was the only place in town that developed film and it usually took 10 days to get the pictures back.
There is really no point in labeling a change such as film to digital as good or bad, it is just change. This change is going to be a disaster for history . I don't keep any pictures, I delete them as fast as I take them. Even people who keep their digital pictures on their hard drive will lose them because hard drives crash. If the photos are put on a CD the CD will become unreadable when the CD's surface deteriotates. Computers even end up in the land fill with pictures still on board. What will happen to the record of individual stories told by families from one generation to another through pictures? There is a wealth of human history that is simply going to be lost.
While we lose somethings we gain others. 45 years ago photography was fairly complex. Today it is really point and shoot. With a digital camera or even a camera phone and a PC just about anyone can produce a high quality photo, publish it by e mail, blog or even upload it to a photo service like Sams where in an hour pick up a great looking photo for 11 cents.
Film is not dead yet but it is sure on its way out along with all those negatives and boxes of old slides. Somethings will never change. Today a Kodak digital camera sets on my desk ready to take a picture at a moments notice just as my Kodak instimatic with its extra roll of film did 45 years ago.