Hate-Love #12

I know, I know, I haven't been posting, bad blogger! Well, naturally, I have an excuse...

I hate...

Uploading photos. Gone are the days when one can take a photo and just hope it's a good one, finally haul yourself to Walgreens to drop off the ten rolls of film you took on your trip to Europe last June, and then pick them up only to put them in a box marked with something along the lines of, "album photos" that will never actually make it to an album. Now, we take a photo, check out if we look awesome enough, and then upload, download, Photoshop, e-mail, tag, print, or post said awesome photos to our myriad social networks full of people that most likely won't really care about them. No doubt, digital photos are a far easier way to share your Kodak moments with the world, and in this day in age there is no way I could part from my digital DSLR camera, but I really miss dropping off my film and anxiously waiting to see what I get back. When I upload my own photos, not only do I have to spend the time organizing them into folders, adjusting the lighting, and uploading them to Facebook so that I can continue to pretend that my "friends" will actually care about them, I also have to back them up on my iPod just in case my computer has another epic freak-out sesh (which happens waaay more often then, say, a fire which is the old school way of losing all your photos). It's kind of exhausting, and since I'm on the computer all the live long day anyway, the last thing I want to do when I get home is pop open my laptop and start a mad photo blitz.

at the same time...

I love...

That we have the technology even available to "upload photos". If I really think about, digital photos are a pretty freakin' amazing bit of technology. I traveled to Thailand for three months in 2008, and digital photography along with the social networking powerhouse, Facebook, allowed me to keep my friends and family back home updated on all my crazy adventures (and my mom to comment on EVERY SINGLE photo) with just a few mouse clicks and about 30 extra minutes every day. Pretty neat, right? I mean, the fact that we even have this kind of technology is pretty astounding. Remember when we didn't have digital photos? Sharing photos was soooo much more difficult! Someone would say, "Hey, you know those photos we took in wine country, can I have copies of those?" And then you would have to either go and pay to get more photos made from your negatives (which really wasn't cheap), or just blow the person off completely, which I think is that most everyone did when friends asked for photo doubles. I also have to admit that though I kind of miss film, I would be shocked by someone who has yet to embrace digital. In fact, a friend recently asked me for hard copies of some photos I took, and I seriously almost told her to shove it (but decided just to ignore her instead). Considering my friend's request in light of all the awesome digital technology that's now available, she may not even be my friend anymore, on Facebook or otherwise! So I guess, even though I hate having to upload photos the alternative is much, much worse.