Phil Brewer's Blog

The air was sickening. How could any one work in such a place. It makes one think that some people are born without any olfactory glands. Mike had worked here in this place, talking to customers who needed their pictures back right away. The local pharmacies had started to promise prints within an hour, so his task of lording over the people that wanted to see their loved ones whom they had snapped pictures only hours before, as if they couldn’t remember what they looked like, was in jeopardy. He was no longer the king of memory.
Worse, the good old days were being so quickly replaced by people who sported these expensive 2.1 mega pixel digital cameras. What a farce, he told them. Over and over again, they would exclaim how cool it was to see the picture immediately. Mike would remind them of the Polaroid craze. It didn’t last. Nothing would ever replace the little pack of cards shuffled with love of people’s memories. These cards, or pictures were a necessity to life. Still, there was something unreal about the quality of these immediate digital pictures. Mike’s thriving lifestyle and little business of taking exposed film and processing it was going to cease. How could technology be so unkind? If the digital craze of photography actually took hold, what would people do with their very expensive single reflex, 35 mm cameras? And they weren’t complete without the bag of necessary accouterments – telephoto lenses, wide angle lenses, tripods, flash attachments, back up batteries, filters, cases, bags, etc, ad-nauseum.
What about the filmmakers? Not to mention the paper makers, the people that made and sold the chemicals for developing the pictures, and on and on? Even as Mike was contemplating, another customer walked, in deposited his film and proudly announced that he was going digital. How many times in human history had technology made obsolete professions and everything associated with them. Even though people hated change, it seemed that in today’s world, more and more people were actually sporting the newest thing. Any one born at the early turn of the 20th century talked about the industrial revolution. But this newer revolution was so much different. There were actually stores that sold the most modern changes. How could one keep up. And looking back, the most modern looking device of today would in less than two years look like a clumsy old dinosaur. You just couldn’t keep up, but worse, you couldn’t even remember how it was just a few short years ago!