I wish I still had some of the photos I took back in the 70’s. I was just a kid then with a simple and small handheld Kodak. You got what you got back then; there were no programs to help fix bad photos and often I’d get back the developed picture and had already totally forgotten what I had taken photos of that day.
Christmas was hit and miss also. Parents would do their best to preserve the moment but if something went wrong they wouldn’t know it until the film came back. There was a time nearly every drug store had a darkroom, that was where the photos were developed, and it would take a week, maybe two. You could send the film off, through the mail, and maybe you’d get them back by the middle of January.
When Polaroid came up with the idea of having your photos spat at you at the moment you pressed the button we all thought we’d hit the epoch of photo shooting. Imagine have a camera that gave you your photos in an instant! Wow! We are the Jetsons!
Drug stores countered the onslaught of new technologies by producing “One Hour Photos” and “Same Day Service” and this was a good thing for that time between those simple box cameras and the digital shooters that were beginning to get cheaper and better.
When I was married my wife took eleventy billion photos of our dog and then wanted to spend money on the one hour service. The dog is still here why do you need to pay for photos of him in an hour? She wasn’t a very good photographer to begin with but that didn’t keep her from burning through a few rolls of film a week. The drug store failed her once and she decided to go to war over the idea that one hour meant one hour and anything over that time frame was a personal affront. It seemed odd, to me, that she couldn’t wait more than an hour, or even a whole day, to get photos of a dog that was walking around in front of her, but as a dutiful husband I wrote an angry email to the parent company of the drug store and we got a lot of free stuff from them. Customer service complaints, even when it’s the customer’s fault, will usually elicit a response from someone up the food chain. I actually felt sorry for the manager in question because even though they couldn’t produce one hour photos as they promised, it was made into a much bigger deal than it had to be. 
But even as early as 1999 film was dying out. Digital cameras were becoming commonplace and printers that delivered quality printed photos on photo paper were beginning to be sold everywhere. On Christmas morning the botched shot or the shot with little Johnny sticking his tongue out could be deleted and another taken. The time between the shot being taken and Gramma in California getting to see it was minutes, at most, not days or weeks. Anyone with a finger could take a photo and everyone did.
I don’t miss the old way of doing things for once.
With digital photography you learn instantly what fading light does, what shadows do, what different exposures can mean, and the one hundred photos of the same subject in different light is cheap as far as materials go. Nothing has changed where it counts because the artistry that real photography demands is still in demand. Anyone can take a photo. A photographer captures a moment in time, the sun at the right angle, the shadows at the perfect depths, and a smile at the instant of emotion.
The digital camera is to the photograph what the keyboard and word processing is to writing. Anyone can operate either, but only an artist can command the medium, be it words or photographs.
Take Care,
Mike
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