I've had a digital camera for years, but until this week it hadn't really changed the way I used photography. Instead of sticking film in an envelope, I stood at the photo kiosk for a half hour every month or so.
I have been carefully filling photo albums for all of my adult life. Yet, it wasn't until last week that I asked myself: Why am I doing this?
I guess it was nostalgia for those childhood afternoons spent poring over the family albums on the coffee table shelf. Turning those pages, I looked into the faces of my younger selves and developed some sort of identity half constructed of memories. I wonder if my kids will get that same sense of transcendence using Flickr.
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After Week 3's class, I plugged in my camera card, logged on and started to play. It was fun, but when I got to the tags the lightbulb really flickred (couldn't help myself) on. A photo of my son, Nick, holding up a blue gill is tagged with fishing, Nick, summer 2008. If I ever do a compilation of family fishing photos I'll type in fishing and it will pop up. For a slideshow of Nick, I'll type Nick and it will come up again. This sure beats hours spent digging through boxes and flipping through pages - not to mention the tedious task of putting all the loose photos back when the project is done.
I shared my photostream with a few contacts I'd lost touch with over the years and was excited to learn that my cousin, Kate, had stopped for a view. I'm going to take pictures at my family reunion this fall, collect e-mail addresses and invite everyone who is interested to take a look.
Don't get me wrong, I still plan to print out some pictures for my albums and my real blog - the front of my refrigerator - but otherwise it's Flickr from here on out.
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