Both my eyes

“Didn’t have a camera by my side this time.
Hoping I would see the world with both my eyes.
Maybe I will tell you all about it
When I’m in the mood to lose my way with words.”
- John Mayer 3×5

The evolution of the camera is truly remarkable. The ability to instantly digitize light and image has transformed us all into photographers, into photo and photoshop enthusiasts and fanatics. A study done recently forecasts that the amount of data produced globally is doubling every two years and will reach 1.8 zettabytes, or 1.8 trillion gigabytes, by end of 2011. In terms of personal use, most of our hard drive, usb drives, external backup drives and cloud storages are filled with megapixels after megapixels of digital imagery.

I remember a time when our family had physical albums that were displayed on a shelf. The albums only held the best photos, the most cherished of memories. The camera, the film, the prints, the photo albums – they were all expensive commodities and so they were used with utmost care, with careful consideration, with an exact purpose, with calculated restraint.

Personal photography back then was very frail and fraught with mistakes. The film was prone to failure, not because of the film, but because of the person handling it. Light and shadow were not easy to capture correctly and you can’t just auto-stabilize or auto-adjust a shot.

We threw out a lot of photos, wasted a lot of film, over- or under-exposed a lot of shots. We regretted many lost images and uncaptured moments. And because we only had one or two good shots, we don’t get to capture the entire scene.

Much as these sound pathetic and unimaginable to the younger generation, those photos that we took were unmistakably, deeply human. They were rough on the edges, imperfect for sure but somehow they felt more valuable or at least more personal.

Now, cameras are attached to our hips. They are on our phones and our tablets. We always have a small one in our bags and we wear DSLRs like sunglasses and sunscreens. We’ve become obsessed with the shutter. We click and then digitize life and landscape like there is no tomorrow. Granted a professional photographer will take a hundred shots to get the one that’s perfect. For the rest of us though, we’ll just go ahead and upload all one hundred photos onto our online albums.

We take pictures of everything now, nothing missed, nothing taken for granted. It’s like a 360 degree panorama of our lives. We take wanton snapshots and convince ourselves that we are doing it so that in the future we can remember. The funny thing is we seldom look at those photos because there are just too many of them, folders after folders, gigabytes after gigabytes. If we do, we look at them as slideshows using a 1-second interval so that we can go through them as fast as possible. Yes, the way we look at pictures has changed, too. In the future, our kids are probably not going to look at them either because they’ll have their own mountains of photos to deal with.

The curious thing about all these is that I’m not against digital cameras at all. I love them and I’m guilty of taking as much photos as my SD card can store. I personally profess that nostalgia shouldn’t get in the way of technology. Digital cameras, without doubt, have done so much for so many people. We’ve been exposed to thousands upon thousands of amazing photos of people, places and events that would not have been previously possible. We now have instant access to friends, family and events.

Today though, I’m on a porch at the Inn Above Onion Creek, sipping iced tea, enjoying the light breeze accented by the ceiling fan above me, looking down at acres and acres of rain-thirsty trees, watching the clouds thicken and pass lazily by.

And so I pause.

Maybe I should put my camera down and just look, really look, at the scene in front of me with just my eyes. And when I find the urge to point-and-click, maybe I should pretend that I have film inside, that I can only afford one or two shots and that the rest of the scenery is really just for me. And years and years later, when I happen to glance at the one or two photos again, I’ll be fine with filling in the details, I’ll be OK piecing together the puzzle from soft, unreliable memory.

I see the sun rise on the front porch. I see the sun set on the back porch. I’m enjoying the confluence of nature and technology, consuming and creating, breathing in and breathing out. Whatever happens in the middle will be a collaboration between digital and organic memories.

cue music:
“Today skies are painted colors of a cowboy’s cliche’
And strange how clouds that look like mountains
In the sky are next to mountains anyway

Didn’t have a camera by my side this time
Hoping I would see the world with both my eyes
Maybe I will tell you all about it
When I’m in the mood
To lose my way but let me say

You should have seen that sunrise
With your own eyes
It brought me back to life
You’ll be with me next time I go outside
No more 3×5′s”

-John Mayer 3×5