Do you remember the days when we used to take pictures with cameras that required film?  When all 34 pictures on the film had been used up we would take it to the drugstore for processing and pick it up three days later (eventually, drugstores got their own in-store processing equipment and the concept of “one hour pictures” was born).  We would go home and look at the pictures, only six of which were any good, and we would throw them into a cardboard box already containing seventeen thousand other pictures.  Every time we put the box back in the closet we would say to ourselves, “I must buy albums and get these photos organized”, but we would know that the pictures wouldn’t be looked at for at least six years, when the bottom of the box would collapse and all of the pictures would fall onto the ground.

Things are so much easier now.  We just take the picture, plug either the camera or the SD card into a slot on the computer, and ten seconds later the pictures are there for our viewing pleasure.  We print the ones we want to print.  Mostly, though, we make desktop backgrounds out of them, upload them to Facebook, and email them to friends and family.  There are no pesky films that cost a fortune and get all screwed up if you open the camera at the wrong time, no dusty old cardboard boxes that take up space, and no pictures lying around that we cannot bring ourselves to throw out even though the top of the subject’s head is cut off and the red-eye makes everyone look like minions of Satan.

The thing is, we look at the pictures.  If we don’t like them, we can edit them, remove the red-eye, fix up the lighting.  And if we really don’t like them, we just hit the Delete button.  Easy-peasy.  The point is, we end up with pictures that we actually like and enjoy looking at.

And that’s what I was doing earlier today.  I was looking at pictures of my kids from when they were a lot younger and littler, and marveling about how they’ve grown and changed since the pictures were taken.

Here are a few of my favourites…

Ah, how they grow up!