By Fifi Rhodes
And if you got a new smart phone for Christmas, or a new digital camera, make a New Year’s resolution to print, store, and then delete some of those pictures you took during the long holiday season.
Otherwise, you’ll find yourself flipping through your photos next year this time and wonder why you thought 12 pictures of your girlfriend in her bikini, or your red car along the beach of Swakopmund, was necessary. I always considered myself an excellent photographer, a hobbyist with no particular skill, but with lots of enthusiasm for the challenge of composing a good shot. In my days it was exciting to shoot a roll of film, take it to the store for developing, and return some time later to pick up my prints. Every pack of pictures would yield some keepers, just as every pack would yield some stinkers – somebody’s eyes were closed, a friend had a previously unnoticed flagpole sticking out of his head, or I wiggled the camera and blurred the shot. That’s how I learned. It’s how I tried to improve. The best fringe benefit of all: the pictures went into a album or shoebox for future reference. So now, any time I want, I can pull the 1981 album out of the cubboard and look at the pictures I took of all my friends and team mates from Celtic in Swakopmund.
Or I can take the 1983 box off the shelf and relive my hey days as a first time father tracing my eldest son’s first steps on mother earth. He was so cute in that nappy and bare chested. Reluctantly, I made the switch from film to digital in 2002, and discovered the joy of instant gratification and the immediate rejection of a mistake. But the downside quickly became evident: to fill the photo albums further, ended when digital photography started. I now have thousands of digital pictures stored in my computer, to the external hard drive or onto my cell phone, but no actual photos. I’ve backed them all up, and some of them are even up there in the sky, floating around in something called “I Cloud.”
If the Good Lord is looking after my pictures, fine. But if it’s an alien technician in a parallel universe, I’m going to be a little upset. A friend confided that she finally went to a photo store or self-serve kiosk (called these days) at WernHill Centre, and paid N$80 to print out just twenty pictures dating back to 1999. Her grandchildren these days grew up on her memory card with no pictures to look at when she opens her albums of yester year. My youngest son, wrote a full page of instructions in lay man’s terms, on how to take and post a picture on Instagram. I’m still working my way through it. I guess Instagram involves instantly sharing pictures of whatever it is I’m doing – in other words, Facebook in living colour. If Facebook floats your boat, good for you. Don’t get me started on Facebook. My kids are enthusiastic Facebookers and they talked me into trying it. All I’ve got is a “friend requests” from people I don’t know. I don’t wish to be rude by ignoring their earnest passionate request to buddy up, but my modest Facebook page is already full of irrelevancies such as a distant cousin’s search for a place to crash at my house or a former work associate’s indecision about whether it’s time to buy a new toothbrush or a cat over a dog. As I was saying, so many photos sitting out of sight and out of mind in my camera or smart phone. I forget when and where I took them. A few include total strangers, people I encountered somewhere and for whatever reason felt compelled to photograph. For all I know, they might include you. I’d print one of them here and perhaps clear up the mystery, but you’d probably sue me for invasion of privacy, and I wouldn’t blame you.