Taking photos wasn’t as easy back then as it is today. To capture a moment, we’d first pick up the camera, carefully frame the shot and press the shutter button. Then we’d wait.
There was a unique thrill in not knowing how the photo we’d taken would turn out. There was no such thing as checking the image on the camera’s small screen. Did we miss the shot? Did someone have their eyes closed? Was the lighting right? Or did everyone look completely different in the photo? We had no way of knowing. There was a set number of frames on a roll of film — 24 or 36. Every photo had a cost, a limit. That’s why we’d think a little more carefully before pressing the shutter button. We wouldn’t shoot the same scene 10 times or waste dozens of frames on a single photo. Taking photos was, in part, about knowing how to choose.
Then the film would end. The film, removed from the camera, would be taken to the photographer. But the real story began after that: the anxious wait.
Sometimes a few days, sometimes longer. During that time, it was as if we were re-shooting the photos in our minds. We’d wonder, “I wonder how they turned out?” The memories of that day would live on in our minds until the photos were developed.
And finally, that little envelope picked up from the photographer.
Inside were dozens of memories we hadn’t seen yet.
Spreading the photos out on the table and flipping through them one by one was like looking through little windows into the past. In some photos, we looked more beautiful than we expected. In others, our eyes were closed. In yet another, just as the shutter was released, one person was laughing while the other was looking somewhere else. But despite all their flaws, those photos had a story.
Because we had waited patiently to capture them.
Today, however, we take photos and see the results in the very same second. If we don’t like them, we delete them. We take them again. If that doesn’t work, we try once more. Without giving the image a chance to linger in our memory, we edit it, apply filters, crop it, and recreate it. We accumulate thousands of photos, yet sometimes we don’t even remember which ones are truly important.
Perhaps while technology has made photography easier for us, it has also taken away — even if only a little — the story and meaning behind the photograph. Indeed, in the past, there was a gap between taking a photograph and seeing it. That gap was where curiosity and excitement thrived. Now, however, there is almost no time at all between taking a photograph and seeing it. Yet there was a certain beauty in not being able to access certain things immediately. A letter arriving days later, slowly turning the pages of a book, waiting to hear a song on the radio again, wondering how the photos you took would turn out. And all of these things had one thing in common: the anticipation of them.
In fact, it wasn’t just the colors, the lighting, or the image quality that made old photographs beautiful. What made them beautiful was that small gap in time between the moment the photo was taken and the moment we look at it again. Because waiting gave the memory time to settle. Today, we have more photos than ever. Yet perhaps the excitement of looking at them has diminished. We capture every moment, but we don’t feel the value of every moment to the same degree.
Perhaps we need to find an old camera every now and then and start using film again. Making do with 36 frames, thinking for a moment before pressing the shutter button, and then leaving the film with a photographer and waiting...
Because some beauties are only beautiful when we can’t reach them right away.
And perhaps life itself is a bit like that;
“Not being able to see everything right away, realizing the value of certain moments only later.”
