A Digital Age

How many digital photos do you have? I can't even count them all. I was looking through them today and couldn't believe how many I haven't even seen before. It has been 4 years since we bought our first digital camera, but somehow I have still not made the transition in my mind from prinited photos in a scrapbook to whatever it is I am going to do with the thousands of digital photos we have taken and continue to take. This wouldn't bother me so much except they are almost exclusively photos of our children. As an adult I feel connected to my past by looking at the photos and photo albums from my childhood. And even more important, I get a glimpse into the childhoods of my parents and grandparents by looking at their old photos. How will our children and grandchildren connect to their past?

Slowly but surely I am trying to wrap my head around the digital legacy we will leave. It frightens me that if something happens to my hard drive, many of the photos will be gone forever. And with digital photography, there are literally thousands of photos taken, instead of hundreds. I want to find a way to customize the viewing method, choose the best pictures and make it entertaining to look at them. Most importantly, I don't want to print them. I don't. It takes too much time. It costs a lot. And it feels wrong to take the medium of the present and convert it to the medium of the past.

So, I came up with this idea of the Video Scrapbook. It seems like a great idea, cause when I looked it up, other people had thought of it, too. I started making them for myself and my family. Then other people saw them, and they wanted one, too. The best part about them is that my kids love to watch the Video Scrapbooks of themselves when they were babies. Already, they are able to connect to their past. And isn't that what taking pictures is all about?