Story: I could learn a lot from the 19 year old me

Recently I was in touch with an old friend I had graduated high school with. She said in a message "I am glad to see you are doing something that you wanted to do. You were the one in school that always had a camera in your hand. I wish I had the pics that you have of all of us." So I decided once and for all I was going to scan in old negatives. I wanted to share with my friends all the memories I captured while at school.

Before I found the digital world I made do with a $40 point and shoot camera. I had the camera since I was 11 years old, and just got it to take pictures while growing up. From 1991 to 1997 all I took pictures of was people I knew, nothing else, and I took a lot of pictures. So I decided to finally hook up the transparency adapter to my scanner, only took 7 years to do so by the way. The negative holder had slots for two rolls of film, and since I was always a "don't cut my negatives" kinda gal, I thought it best to use one for school days and one for travel days. For some reason I don't have any prints of my travels when I was first starting out. I just figured they weren't very good, especially with all I've learned in the last 10 years. I figured since they are 5-10 years old though that I better scan them and save them before the negatives finally get so old I won't be able to see the pictures.

With the first roll in as I was in the scanning process I pretty much went into complete shock. Every picture was turning out good. I thought this cant be right, are these my negatives? Sure enough after confirming this with my brother online, they were in fact pictures I had taken. After completing the entire roll of 'my first trip to California', I realized that all 25 pictures were fantastic. How could this be?, I thought. Well of course California is beautiful, that could be a reason. But I was just in Cali last summer, in the same town, on the same pier. I took pictures! what has happened to me?! They didn't look as good. In fact put side by side my $40 camera pictures out shined my $1000 camera pictures. Sure you can't compare the quality of the point and shoot against my Coolpix or D80, but you can compare the quality of person. To this I took a break from scanning to think things over and have since found my answer.

In this digital world we throw our 4gb memory cards into our cameras and just shoot away. We don't have to worry about anything. We can review our pictures, we can delete on the spot, we can take as many pictures as we want, we can even download pics to a notebook where we stand taking the pictures. It's easy, its normal for me to leave my house just cruising around town and come back with 500 pictures. It's not uncommon for me to go on vacation and take 1,500 pictures a day. It's normal for me to see a bug and say oh let me take pictures of it for an hour for the hell of it. There's nothing to be scared about, there's no paying out of pocket to see prints out of your 35mm camera. There's no buying film or $20 batteries every time your camera battery goes dead. So what has happened to me is that I've gotten lazy! With my point and shoot non digital camera I looked around before I shot. I lined things up, I felt the atmosphere. I thought, ok I have 25 pictures, let's make every shot count. I can honestly say I don't do that anymore. With this I have learned a valuable lesson. I refuse to come back from vacation with 10,000 pictures and throw 1/4 into the recycling bin. My thinking has been, well practice makes perfect. I shoot like a crazy person on crack with a camera in their hands. I now look forward to the future. I want to be proud of the quality, not just the quantity. I want to think like that 19 year old on a budget again. From this moment forward I'm going to start making every shot count, again. And hope I remember this always.