Photo Stream

Every time I pick up my phone, it seems a child has taken at least another dozen photos on it.  Not of their surroundings (no matter how beautiful in Scotland last week, for example).  Of themselves.  On top of this, they have now added an app called Musical.ly which allows them to do freeze frame miming along to all sorts of snippets of dialogue or songs.  'Done forty one now' I was proudly informed yesterday.  These mini videos (I think they are called vines??!) are actually very funny.  And my daughter in particular has become adept at the required array of facial expressions.  However, it has struck me just how comfortable their generation is in front of a camera.

 

Think about those nineteenth and early twentieth century photos of people gazing warily out.  Formally posed, probably having to sit still for ages.  You might, if your family history is relatively prosperous, have a few of these portraits.  Most people will have less than a few, often none.  As cameras improved and sized-down, styles of photography have gradually changed of course.  But one of the biggest changes in the last decade has been the quantity of pictures of everyone.  No longer constrained by length of film ('Saving the last frame for the last day'), rarely by cost of developing said films, we are all just click-clicking away.  Telling ourselves we are trying to get the perfect shot but in reality, never getting round to deleting the nineteen that don't make it onto Facebook.

 

Sometimes, I try to clear down my phone.  Like when Apple start asking me to pay for more 'Cloud'.  However, this weekend, I began to investigate some family photos which my father has lent to me.  and I thought how lucky my descendants would be to have access to such a wealth of photos as we will leave behind from the current technology.  My son even wore a Go-Pro camera to capture a family visit to Go Ape last week.  As if we were all in a documentary or something.  And without prompting, he kept up a really funny running commentary.  He has learnt from his hours of watching YouTube channels.  He was completely comfortable with this.  I, on the other hand, spent most of the time trying not to appear on camera.  Descendants be damned.  No-one in the future needs to see footage of my backside going up a tree ladder...