Four Weeks
I walked into the McDonald Giant Eagle, grasping my disposable camera in one hand and my wallet in the other. I had one purpose that pleasant August afternoon- to get the photos from my last dance recital developed so I could bring them to Penn State with me in two weeks. I approached the lottery ticket counter and kindly asked the woman what the procedure was for getting my film developed. I found that this particular Giant Eagle no longer developed its own film; instead it shipped the film to Maryland to be developed. The whole process took about four weeks. Four weeks! I thought. I had no other choice but to hand over my camera and wait until my prints would return from their journey to Maryland. On the way home I started thinking about how much photography had changed over the last 60 years. No photo company other than Kodak truly displays the fascinating transitions that photography has gone through. The Kodak Company has kept up with our ever changing society.
“Be an expert picnic-packer- take along your camera!” The ad features a family strolling along on the green grass. A man in his Levi’s is carrying a delicately woven picnic basket and holding the hand of a little girl with braided pigtails in green plaid pants. On the other side of the girl walks a woman in a light pink dress of modest length holding a Kodak camera in one hand and her child’s hand in the other. The Kodak ads of the 1950s were geared towards women, and reflected their pursuit of perfection. Other ads pictured young women in the city with attractive young men. The woman was always carrying the camera, or using it to take a picture.
The Kodak ads of today are slightly different. Ads usually feature a group of people laughing or smiling. The camera is no longer present in the hands of those in the ad. Instead, the theory is that the ads show moments that can be captured with a Kodak camera. Both the new and old methods of advertising suggest that using a Kodak camera is the best way to take a picture. In the 1950’s the “perfect” women always had her Kodak camera with her. Today, the message is that Kodak cameras help you to capture the special moments in life that you will always remember.
Camera technology has changed immensely since Joseph Niépce took the first photograph in 1826 with the camera obscura (National Geographic). The camera obscura consisted of a small room with a hole in one side. Light from a scene would pass through the hole and reproduce the image upside down on a chemically treated surface. Camera technology developed quickly over the next 75 years, but cameras remained an item only possessed by photographers. When George Eastman founded Kodak, his main goal was, “to make the camera as convenient as the pencil” (About Kodak). Kodak changed everything about photography by making cameras available to ordinary people. Kodak has stuck to Eastman’s wishes by adapting to digital camera technology with easy to use cameras and “easyshare” photo software for computers. My grandmother, who isn’t exactly computer savvy, recently made the switch to digital photography and uses the Kodak brand because it is “easy to use and understand.”
Digital photography in general is “easy to use and understand.” You no longer have to take a couple different pictures to make sure everyone is smiling and posed correctly. Once you take the picture it appears on the screen and you can decide whether to keep it or trash it. The days of waiting for film to be developed are over. Taking photos has always been easy, but the advancements in digital photography have made it even simpler. When I was a little girl, my dad bought me my first camera. It was white, bulky, and perfect for a child. Rather than having one viewfinder, it had two. I had a really hard time with closing one eye while keeping the other open, so having two viewfinders made this particular camera perfect for me. Digital Cameras for children today feature characters like Dora the Explorer or Spongebob Squarepants. They are not as bulky, and the double viewfinder is missing. What kid needs a viewfinder when the digital image they are about to capture is present on the screen before they even press the button?
When I was first learning to use my camera, I had to learn to compensate for parallax. Parallax is a problem with film photography where what you see in the viewfinder is slightly different from what the lens captures. Parallax is the reason why we have those hilarious childhood photos of dad with the top of his head missing. Today parallax is no longer an issue. Cameras either have a digital viewfinder or no viewfinder at all. While this is insanely convenient in the world of photography, we will no longer be graced with the adorable, choppy, and hilarious pictures taken by children. My sister Madeline, who just turned seven, has had a bright pink digital camera since she was five. Her small memory card is a gallery featuring blurred photos of my little brother and my step-mom. Her images feature one of the big issues with digital photography, having to stay absolutely still while taking a picture. Just the slightest quiver of the hand can cause your picture to turn into something straight out of a horror movie, with everyone’s faces being blurred beyond recognition. Sure, there are cameras that you can buy that eliminate this issue, but they cost a lot more than your average digital camera.
People today have the ability to be on facebook while texting three people and watching TV. Phones are available to people who want to talk and check their email at the same time. Cameras are beginning to reflect our love of multi-tasking. Many cameras now let you edit your photos before you even put them onto a computer. Now instead of just taking a picture with your camera, you can take a photo, and make it black and white except for one particular color. Before, this kind of photo editing was only available with photo software for a computer. Now you can edit photos right on the camera screen, because editing on a computer would just take too much time.
As a society, we love faster and more convenient technology. We are becoming accustomed to getting everything we want right away. Honestly, waiting for a bus at the White Building was the longest I’ve waited for anything that was supposed to be “convenient” in the last month. Convenience used to mean easy, now it not only means easy, but also fast. It is no longer convenient to drive down to the local grocery store, drop off your film, and come back an hour later to pick up the prints. That process takes too much time out of our busy lives. In a world of facebook and text messaging, why should anyone have to wait an hour for pictures to be developed? Although I love the new digital era, I will always miss the days of using up the last exposures on my roll of film with funny pictures of my family, and waiting while the photos were developed. Waiting for my pictures to be developed always had a suspenseful and exciting quality about it.
On occasion my friends and I will buy disposable cameras just for fun. For the prom we bought disposable cameras to use at the dance. Of course we still took the normal posed pictures of the group around the yard, but my favorite pictures were the ones that were taken at the dance. Since we couldn’t see the pictures after they were taken, there was no way to avoid embarrassing photos. When we had the pictures developed and looked through them, it was hilarious to see all of the unattractive facial expressions. Many of the pictures would have been deleted immediately if we had used digital cameras. Because they could not be deleted, we were forced to keep the good and the bad photos, making a great collection of prom pictures.
Photography is technology; therefore, it is going to change. Speed is the name of the game now. The days of waiting in anticipation for your film to be developed are over. Why wait when you have the option of seeing your images seconds after the lens clicks? New camera technology has its positives and its negatives. It is fantastic to be able to see the image you’ve just captured to make sure that everyone is smiling, or that the camera focused correctly. Yet this instant satisfaction feeds into our “I want it now” mentality. It isn’t wrong to want to see your photos right after they have been taken, but occasionally it is nice to do things the old way. I love the feeling of tearing into an envelope full of pictures and not knowing what the next picture is going to bring. The pictures that were sent to Maryland to be developed are sitting in the office of the Giant Eagle collecting dust and waiting for my return. I can't wait to look through them. I love that each photo will be a tiny surprise.
