Family Life

For years Debbie has complained about how my camera is big, bulky, heavy, awkward, and complicated. So I bought her a digital camera for Christmas. It’s small and featherlight, and it’s fully automatic. Nothing manual at all. As a bonus, it also does video clips. She loves it.

The result is we now have an abundance of photos of the kids. This is good. Once child #3 arrived our photo-taking dropped off substantially–it was just too much hassle to haul the camera out, and we were far too busy chasing after our children. The quick convenience of this tiny new camera means we barely have to think about it. The camera doesn’t get in the way and is easy to set aside in case an emergency develops during a photo shoot.

Say, for example, Micah begins to topple over. He often gets himself into precarious positions, so toppling is a common exercise. With the big camera I’d have to carefully set it down out of harm’s way before turning to catch the baby. By then he’s already toppled, so I might as well not bother. Rather, the situation tends to encourage shooting the whole sequence of images. I won’t be able to save him anyway, so I might as well capture the event for posterity, complete with bawling baby at the end. Pretty hard on the kids, eh? So for the sake of a happy household we cut back on photos.

The new camera is small enough and light enough to continue taking pictures (or video) with one hand, even as I reach out and catch Micah with the other. Easy. Thus, we have a lot more photos of our (happy) children.

This is also our downfall. Tonight I spent hours sorting through the backlog since Christmas, deciding which ones to print, which ones to post online, which ones to archive. I got a lot done but I’m not finished yet. Normally I try to keep on top of it, sorting photos frequently so it doesn’t become a mammoth task. I’m finding that if I write blog posts I don’t have time for photos, and if I do photos I don’t have time for the blog. I want to do both. What a dilemma.

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