Before Charlotte was born, we bought her a new Moleskine (sized A4) for a first-year journal, and I bought a new camera with the cash I was planning on buying an acoustic bass with. My better half is a talented historian, and I’m a little obsessive and compulsive. We planned on recording everything. Everything.
I didn’t mean to, but I’ve found myself watching important moments through my camera’s LCD screen, and I’m so behind in journaling (and I haven’t cracked Charlotte’s volume open) that I can’t stand to sit down and begin to write anything at all. Today, I noticed a nice red stuck pixel in the middle of my camera’s pictures. Great. I know that bad pixels are a fact of digital photography, but a red one right in the middle is disconcerting. I spent the night trying out CHDK, but their website and download pages have been down all night. And the firmware version is conflicting with what it’s supposed to be. Canon said to send it back to them. Okay, that’s like $15-$20 in shipping and a week or two (or three) without my camera.
In itself, that’s not the end of the world. I could do something scummy, like buy my camera over again and return the one I have now, since my return period is over. Aside from being scummy, I’m sentimental, and I don’t want to do that. This camera took Charlotte’s first picture ever. But I find myself hoping that she doesn’t do anything too memorable in the meantime. And this is stupid.
For another thing, if it were me, I’d rather hear the story from my parents than see the photos. My parents took tons and tons of photos of their boys as children. But my own memory and hearing my parents tell me things that I don’t remember serve me better for my nostalgic needs than photo albums. In fact, there are some I’ve probably never even bothered to look through.
I’ve developed a strange “I’m getting older” and “important things are happening now” penchant for writing everything down and recording everything (that sounds like it’s own blog post) over the last few years. I worked all day and spent half the time Charlotte was awake messing with my camera like her childhood depended on it. But worrying more about some photos and posting them on Facebook seems like a waste of energy to me these days.
But, you know. Tell me that.
Read more past posts:
The ol’ document it or experience it dilemma, eh? I went through a weird documentaion frenzy when I knew we were leaving Japan and I reckon that the photos I took during that time are the best I’ve ever taken. It’s all about the investment you have in your own social identity (Don’t ask me about my dissertation, you don’t want to know!).
I see you’ve managed to organise your documentation into two nice blogs with a coversheet though. For the past month and a half I’ve been working on the exact same thing only I’ve got no idea what I’m doing so I keep getting stuck. Yours look great though. Good work!
>The bizarre urge to document everything.
:)
you blogged this…
Johnny- which Canon digi-cam did you get?
The s90 — great features and even better reviews. Other than this issue (which, in its defence, every camera I’ve ever had shared), I’m loving it.