Now & Then - Start Camera

A few weeks ago, an extremely dangerous activity bordering on the impossible was undertaken. The Missus was trying to take a picture of a certain object (activity) and was trying to make it look good in that picture (extremely dangerous and bordering on the impossible).

Here is a short summary of how the whole exercise went. Snap 1: Eyes closed. Snap 2: Hair all wrong. Snap 3: Red-eye Snap 4: Can't differentiate between the Elephant standing next to it. Snap 5: "Woah, come what may, please don't pose like that again".

Somewhere between these snaps, The Object couldn't help but rewind to about a decade or two back in time. Do you remember the time when :



- your way-too-cautious friend said that some local studios might sell you exposed film and you had to check if the roll was good by pulling it out once completely and rewinding it back again ?
- each photo used to be a work of art because every photographer has the magic number "36" in his mind ?
- you had to shelve your school photo because you were caught staring at a girl and no amount of begging would melt the heart of that stingy photographer ??
- you had to squint through a small screen which had a much smaller square to view objects ??
- you had to whirr a small wheel like madness after taking a picture to move the film roll ahead ??
- you paused a second to wonder if you have whirred so much that you moved far ahead ?
- you wait for a little over two days to find out how exactly your pictures had come ?
- and when you search for that self-declared 'artful photo' you found it so shaken up like it was shot from inside the blender ?
- after careful analysis of the negatives, you chose a picture to blow-up as a portrait and it turned out to be the 'other' picture where your eyes were half closed ?
- gotten kicked after someone found that their dare-devil, one-handed stunt was missed just by a fraction of a second only to show them stupidly grinning ?
- after days and days of striking poses in biting cold only to realize your friend didn't load the film properly ?
- you really surged in front of the crowd to be in the frame because photographs were actually rare ?
- a great murder mystery will be painstakingly revealed as the hero washes the photo in slow motion ?
- photo albums for an entire trip of two weeks used to be a total of 50+ photos, as against the few hundreds taken over an evening walk these days ?
- you take a look at your old albums and remember people, the photographs and the exact backstory behind each one of them because there were so few pictures to begin with as against the innumerable ones sitting in your online album which you don't even bother to clear?

The Object heaves a sigh. As much as he wonders about the past, he is silently glad that technology has improved so much that with a few hours on Photoshop, even The Object can look presentable. That should be refreshing.