Make them last forever-ish

Hello boys and girls, ladies and gents, pets and relatives we own, but don’t enjoy. Gather around the campfire and let ol’ Uncle Mark tell you a story about preserving your memories.

Remember back in the good old days of photography when cameras held film that was to be developed someday? Ah, can you hear the tray of slides circling around the projector, the hum of the machine and the pictures Great Aunt Helen took at that insurance seminar in 1969? Those were something, weren’t they? Even still, remember tak-ing that freshly popped Polaroid picture and shaking it like a crazy person to get it to develop faster? Them was the days, gang, and they are long gone.

I love my cellphone – even if I have no data plan and don’t use it as a communication device. It holds the podcasts I listen to on a daily ba-sis, it houses the Facebook app which I use to see who is complaining about the newspaper and, unfortunately, it holds a lot of pictures of my family, friends and (too many) pictures of my Chihuahua, Stella.

Yes sir, the glory of having a camera in my back pocket so I can take a picture of anything and everything I want at a minute’s notice is amazing. Technology is something…till it ain’t.

If you are like me and capture birthday parties, graduations, spelling bees etc. all. …on your cellphone, you are like the rest of socie-ty…welcome to the club.

Unfortunately, if you ever want to take said pictures and have them printed (especially in a newspaper) you are doing yourself a disservice by logging all your precious memories on your nifty little piece of tech-nology. To put it mildly, the resolution of those cellphone pictures “rots.” Now they don’t rot as much as they did 10-years ago, but rot they do. We get some cell-pictures submitted here at the PCN and it is hard to tell if they were taken 10-days ago or 10-decades ago. They are grainy, the color is lousy and you might as well draw a picture and send it because the clarity, often times, would be 100-percent better.

That is not to say that we don’t appreciate people sending cell pic-tures. Not in the least bit. We will try and import them in Photoshop and make them usable, but sometimes it is a fruitless battle. In one breath, I will say “keep them coming” but in the other I will say “we aren’t miracle workers.”

Do yourself a favor and head over to Todd’s Technology and pur-chase a point-and-shoot camera. Take your pictures, print them at Valley Drug and then slap them into a photo album. Digital files are nice, but accidents happen and data can be erased. Ensure you are capturing your memories not just for the internet, but for life. Forever-ish.

Thanks for reading and aloha.