I was reminded of this powerful equation recently when I got the chance to look at 40-year-old photos I haven’t seen in – probably not 40 years – but a very long time.
My mother had kept some old slides we had from over the years, 142 of them to be exact. When the last projector broke, we had family discussions on what to do with the slides. Should we scan them? No, the quality was not good enough. Cameras weren’t that great back then unless you were a professional photographer. And whoever took the photos was definitely not a professional – you know, heads cut off, people so far away you couldn’t tell who was who; a photo of people in a car – but you can’t see the people in the car because of the glare on the windshield.
The funny thing is, the slides I finally had digitized (that is a verb, right?) weren’t “tagged” with location, but somehow it didn’t matter. We all knew where most of them were taken when we had a chance to see them yesterday. When I got the email telling me my project was finally finished and I could view the images, I dropped everything and clicked on the link. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I alternated between the two. And then I immediately called my mother, who had been waiting to see these images, while we arranged for me to get the slides from my sister and ship them. It took a leap of faith to let the shipping company take the box from my hands, and then we waited.
The first photo I saw was of my dad. My dad died over 19 years ago, so for that to be the first image that I opened was a bit startling. I had forgotten how handsome he was. He had been sick for quite a few years before he died, so my more recent memories of him were quite different from the image in the photo. And our grandfather — how long since I had seen a photo of him? Someday soon I’ll write about the photos taken of us in Europe; five sisters from age 5 to 17, and my parents, who were very brave to travel with such a motley crew.
Oh, how I wish I had my iPhone back then!! Imagine the photos and videos we could be looking at now? All neatly uploaded into an album shared on Flickr, Facebook, Snapfish, Shutterfly, and possibly even in a printed photo book. That’s about the only way I print photos now, if I take the time and effort to create a photo book. And I do just that for my family vacations. We look at those books often, my son and husband and I.
So now I go back to looking at these old photos and I wonder – if one picture is worth a thousand words, what is a lifetime of some of the most wonderful memories worth? All I know is, you can’t put a price on it. Because all the money in the world couldn’t buy this feeling.
This is my first story for Lockstock Communications. What story can we tell about you or your company?
