Camera Day

Oops! The world had another one off those "days" and as always, I missed it.  June 29 was Camera Day, according to something called 'Your Take's you are supposed to take your best shots and share them on line.  On Your Take's version of Camera Day you are supposed to log in with a Face book or Google account at the your take web site and start uploading your best shots of whatever lifts your spirits (sigh...that might mean a million more cat pictures). Your Take selects the best photos and uses them in the USA newspaper each year. basically, any idiot can push a button and take a photo, so this could be the "art" best suited to my limited abilities.

Your Take is just one of the web sites that promotes the amorphous Camera Day (it's really an unofficial holiday). I looked on line and could find no one who claimed to know how Camera Day started or who founded it, but I acknowledge that despite my ineptitude with cameras (and every other technology known to man) once in a while I do appreciate a good picture. For many people, a camera is a vital tool to record important events in the family and in the world.  It creates the memories that we share and look back upon in our lives and the lives of society. But then, there are the cell phone camera addicts who do none of that. Instead, they just annoy us with selfies showing how stupid humans can be.

I am always at least a decade behind others in adapting to a technology, if I adapt at all (most times I don't want to adapt).  In fact, the camera I own today is one of those point and shoot for idiot varieties I bought in 2007 and rarely use it. The world should thank me for that.  I don't want complications with my technology. For me the more involved, the more features on a camera the less likely I will ever use it. But with digital technology, using a camera has never been easier. Unfortunately though, cameras are built into cell phones and this makes the cell addict twice as annoying as pre camera phone days of so long ago.

Those cell cameras are proof that too much of anything can become bad, because we now are assaulted with an endless array of photos, quickly forgotten and discarded.  Remember the old days of print photography images? We snapped pictures sparingly,  treasured them, and put only the special ones in photo albums that were used as historical recording. But now, with some many pictures so easily taken dumped on a hard drive, we no longer separate the important from the inconsequential. And most of what we shoot with our cameras today is inconsequential mush. Today's easy photo image recorder is like the cook who serves us steak for dinner every night. The steak soon becomes ordinary and then tiring to eat.  With so many pictures snapped the value of the good ones is debased to some degree. hence, every five minutes someone will shout to us, "Hey! Look at my cute cat photos." There should be a particularly painful place in hell for the cat cameraman.

But my complaints are a bit overstated. The camera is an irreplaceable tool used to record and replicate memories, events and people/places. Before the invention of the camera, the only resource to document a vision was a painting (the reason for all those old portrait paintings). As bad as those cat pictures are to take today, I sure don't want to be forced to endure an assault of cat paintings. May all your cat pictures be directed toward others.