When I was a kid, Mom was the family photographer. She had an Ansco box camera that took B&W pictures with film and no flash. It didn’t even have a lens. She used it for years until Dad bought her a Brownie that took color pictures using film and a flash. I wish I had a picture of the smile on her face when she opened that present!

I took a lot of pictures over a twenty- or so-year period with a Nikon, fully manual model. It accompanied me on fishing trips, backpacking, and any time the family assembled, and we wanted to mark the occasion. Those old, faded pictures testify to the fact that we were there at that time and here’s what it looked like.

Today, everyone carries a camera in their phone, and most professionals use digital cameras. Picture taking has changed significantly. Back in the old days, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, you had to have film to take pictures, and that film had to be processed and a print made before you could see the picture you took. The process and the film cost money and it took a few days before the results were in. The advent of 24-hour film processing was a giant step as far as we were concerned.

Another limitation was the number of pictures you could take on a roll of film before it had to be carefully extracted to avoid exposure to light and another roll popped in. When there is a cost associated with taking a picture and having it developed, the person behind the camera has a totally different mindset. They pay more attention to the framing of the shot than someone who can shoot and keep on shooting with little cost.

The culture around photos has also changed. We take so many more than back in the film camera days that our phones, computers, and other storage devices are crammed with thousands of pictures. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is a thousand pictures worth?

There are more pictures taken and stored than we have time to look at. I don’t know how other families rolled, but back in the day, we would take out the album or set up the projector for the slides and get together to view and comment on the pictures there a couple of times a year. This was usually around Thanksgiving or Christmas, but it could also happen any weekend the weather was bad. How often does a family get together to go over the family pictures and discuss family history these days?

Yes, our relationship with pictures has changed a lot in just a short time. Where it used to be an opportunity for a family to get together and talk over old times, we now take thousands of pictures we’ll rarely see again, and as far as I have been able to determine, the get-togethers are not as frequent as they used to be. We do send each other more pictures than before. They are sent electronically instead of through the mail. The change in our relationship to pictures, like many other changes in the way we live, has also changed our relationship to each other as well.

There are many pluses to having picture taking as easy and cheap as it has become. We can easily set up cameras to identify thieves. We can get not just a still of baby’s first steps, but we can easily make a video of it. We can also make videos of people committing a crime such as assault. Can’t describe the part you want on the phone? Send them a picture. Can’t be at the birthday party? Be there virtually through a camera and a screen.

Pictures, both still and moving, have become a convenience we are hesitant to let loose of. However, the trade-off is that we have become the most surveilled population in history. The government, owned by those with far more wisdom than we can imagine, has decided we need even more cameras. Now they are putting them up everywhere. If this isn’t scary enough, software has been invented that can manipulate the images already stored in the camera. Of course, it’s all for our convenience and protection.

There used to be a program on TV called, “Candid Camera.” (Smile! You’re on Candid Camera!”) Several versions of this program have been aired showing silly things people do when they think no one is watching. I wonder what direction society is going to evolve in when our children grow up knowing they are on camera even in their most personal moments. Will there even be space in a world like this for personal moments?