Exercising my ‘old guy’ privilege to be contradictory about ‘gadgets’
You might say I’m exercising my “old guy” privileges to be somewhat contradictory about my last post regarding “gadgets” and high-tech stuff. I have to admit I have mixed feelings about digital cameras.
A friend of ours from far away was coming through town last week and spent two nights staying with us. She’s from Idaho and was my wife’s best-friend from high school. (I won’t say when they graduated, but I graduated in 1965 and they were two years before me. HAH!) This friend, we’ll call her Judy, has an old-fashioned look-through-the-viewfinder, 35mm camera. That’s in keeping with Judy’s “anti-high-tech-anti-electronic-gadgets” outlook on life. Just the opposite of my wife and I, who are pretty computer and gadget savvy.
I was lauding the joys of our simple but effective digital Kodak. She told me about the 62 rolls of film she brought back from a trip last year to Panama. I was amazed. “Judy,” I said (or something like that), “why, I’ve got an sd flash memory card in this camera not much bigger than two thumbnails which will hold over 900 color pictures. It’s great.”
Judy quickly pointed out that she doesn’t even own a computer, so probably that wouldn’t be too useful for her.
The final blow to my “gadget arrogance,” though, came when she handed me her camera to take a picture of her and my wife. It had the old “hold-in-near-your-eyeball” viewfinder and a button you give a single, solid push on to take pictures. It was wonderful looking in the viewfinder, instead of holding my digital camera almost arms length and tilting/tipping the camera around trying to center the image. When I pushed the shutter button, there was a satisfying click, immediate response, and the joy of hearing the film whir as it advanced automatically to the next frame.
Ah, I missed all those things from old 35mm cameras I had in the past.
Judy went back to Idaho yesterday. We really enjoyed seeing her and hearing of her many adventures throughout the U.S., Mexico, and South America. I particularly enjoyed that single chance to use her old-fashioned camera. Maybe I’ll get one and let the battery-draining-digital set on the shelf for awhile. Who knows …
