The Speed of Things...

Photo: © Daniel De Granville, 2008

Some firsthand thoughts that I had today about photography in the digital age.

It all started last Monday, when we met some college teachers from Rio de Janeiro that we had met in the Pantanal during one of their field excursions, back in 2004. After some chatting, we decided to take a group picture and someone made the comment about not having seen any pictures from that trip. Only then we remembered that, in those days, very few people in Brazil had digital equipment, and cell phones with cameras were a thing of the future. Then I remembered that 2004 was the year when I bought my very first digital camera, a Canon EOS 10D.

Cut to yesterday, when I went to take photos of a local hotel that I had already photographed in 2002. I have just downloaded the files from my memory cards to the computer: 227 images, considering that I haven’t yet photographed the rooms (which means that I’ll easily go over 300 shots). On those photo sessions seven years ago, all I used were no more than two rolls of film, or 72 pictures...

Finally, every now and then I go over my 10 memory cards just to make sure that no image was left behind without being saved into the computer. This afternoon I found a bunch of unpretentious photos that I took about two weeks ago. My sensation was the same as if I was looking at old pictures that remained forgotten in some picture album, and that I didn’t even remember about.

Definitely, things are really changing in this photographic world...

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