The digital junk
I do not remember that last time I used a roll camera (that’s the name right?). Roll cameras were not expensive, but the cost of the rolls made people think twice before they shot a picture. We counted our special moments based on the availability of the film roll. Our special moments were well planned and picture perfect.
A few days back, I was going through some of my old pictures in one of my hard disk. It was then I wondered how did I even capture some of those pictures. I even stored pictures of the parking lot location which I usually click to spot my car easily, something I do even today. It was a digital photograph. When I dug through the huge collection of my digital photographs, I wondered many times if I must delete a particular picture. If I did so, I would have deleted almost everything. No photograph was picture perfect. They were random clicks of me, my friends and the objects around us. Few included the picture of my broken phone which I shot to upload on my Facebook. Of course, I felt nostalgic and it even felt lively. It reminded me of the character Emily from the movie A lot like love, where she snatches Oliver’s camera and says “This is your trip, it’s happening right now” and takes picture of her crotch and shoots Oliver randomly.
Intrigued, I went and looked for the photo prints I had. The ones I shot before I was introduced to a digital camera. Almost, my entire senior high school life was over in a mere hundred pictures. I went further back, I probably have around fifty pictures from my nursery to high school. That is ‘only fifty’ pictures for almost ten years. I did not include pictures shot at family functions and weddings in the count.
If we fast forward a few years ahead from my senior high school days, I almost have hundred pictures for a semester!
I am in a process of organising all of them, with no heart to delete even one. Even if a picture is random and won’t make sense to anyone apart from me, it does bring back some memories to me in a way or another.
Now another problem arises in storing all of these pictures. The file size! At first I had digital cameras of low pixel rate, slowly the pixel rate increased and so the file size. When I store all these pictures, it is going to be my life in random. It is also interesting to see visually how my life transformed as well as my likings.
As a kid I used to collect pebbles, bottle crowns, wrappers and so on. When I grew I saw them as junk, but never had the heart to throw them as they had a story of their own. Today I am in the same place where I have huge digital junk and am unable to discard them.
