Am I old enough to wax nostalgia? (No, but you'll have to hear me out anyways)

I've been doing some massive reorganization of my loft over the past few weeks ... anyways, today I found my personal mementos box, containing photos, cards, and letters (mostly from college). Anyways, I was looking at some prints I made from my SLR and an early digital camera (I remember paying an arm and a leg for an early 3.3 megapixel camera) and realized that I was one of the (un)fortunate ones who "grew up" with film cameras. When I went on my photography trip to Vietnam and Korea, a dSLR wasn't available to consumers. I shot the whole trip on film positives (slides) ... I paid roughly $3 a shot ($1 per shot per roll, $2 per shot for development)! Even then, I still had to pay $1,000 for a film scanner and spend countless hours scanning my slides into their digital equivalents!

Jeju Island, Korea, 2002

I think the digital film explosion over the past five years has been remarkable, but it makes me long for the days when a picture was truly rare. When I find a picture of myself and my friends, that truly is a rare picture - there is probably not another copy of that photo anywhere (because I never developed doubles and I lost the negs).

When I look at pictures on Flickr ... they seem so ... uniform. CCDs have reached such a starking level of clarity and precision that the pictures lack imperfection. A few years ago, I took a trip with my friends to the mountains - most of the pictures I took on that trip was with a Polaroid (you know, the kind with the instant film!) ... the pictures are fading fast now, but the blurriness and imperfections of the physical media make me more nostalgic than finding an old digital picture of myself on Facebook. Memories fade for a reason - maybe pictures should, too.

I'm going to India in February, and I hope to rediscover my love of photography on that trip. I was thinking of buying a Rebel sTI, but at this point, I'm almost convinced just to go buy a whole bunch of slide film and go through the painful processing of getting digital versions of non-digital photos.

Somewhere in Vietnam, 2002