Snapping a picture: Back when

I just bought a new camera, and I'm experimenting with taking pictures with it. I guess some people these days are wondering why anyone needs a camera when a cell phone has a perfectly good built-in camera? One of my answers is that it still seems weird to me to be taking a picture with a phone. A second answer is, when a camera stores pictures on an SD card, I know now to move the pictures to my computer, print them, and look at them on a big screen. With my phone, I don't have means for moving my pictures or printing them. I really don't want to pay for Internet on a smart phone, so I continue to use a dumb phone. I and my dumb phone can make calls to just about anywhere, and my dumb phone easily does texting. I came from ancient times when a phone was a phone, and a camera was a camera, and never the twain had to meet.

My new camera is about 1 inch thick, about 2 1/4 inches high and about 3 3/4 inches wide. Compared to cameras of the years gone by, my new little marvel is quite small. The first camera I remember in my childhood, beginning about 1944, was a Kodak box camera. Obviously it was not digital. To us, back then, a digit might refer to a finger on your hand, or it might denote a numeral which was part of a number. Digits, back then, had nothing to do with cameras or pictures or TV signals or TV displays. Now, of course, digits are everything to cameras and TVs and computers, and other electronics. In the 1940s, even though there were cameras made by other companies such as Argus, so many early cameras had been Kodaks that many people just referred to cameras as Kodaks. When you were asked, "Do you have a Kodak?" you probably were not being asked the brand or make of your camera, you were being asked if you had a picture-taker, a camera?

Our Kodak box camera was not small, unless one compared it to the gigantic wood box cameras of the late 1800s, with their sliding plates and all. Our Kodak was a film camera. You could take eight pictures on a roll of film. The pictures, of course, were black and white. Color film would be invented several years later. Kodak was very big in all things photographic in those days. By the 1950s, color film was available, but the early colors weren't very durable. Many early color pictures soon began to fade. I heard a story some years ago of a little boy, who, after looking at pictures of his family members from the early 1940s, asked his mother, "Momma, did the world used to be gray?" What a good question! Ok, to be sure, back in the 1940s grass was green and flowers were yellows and purples and reds and shades of blue, but the early 1940s were indeed kind of gray. Those were World War II years, and the situation seemed bleak at times, and gray.

One advantage with our old Kodak was that no batteries were needed. You just took it out of the box, or off the shelf, installed the roll of film, and began snapping pictures. Our camera didn't require complicated adjustments, you didn't have to set the focus, or the size of the aperture, or a light control, you just aimed and snapped. But, then at that point, one of the big differences showed up compared to today's digital cameras. Today's cameras are like a semi-automatic gun -- when you press the button, it fires -- takes a picture, that is! With our old box camera, after clicking the shutter to expose your picture, you then had to advance the film. Otherwise, with our camera, you would be shooting another picture on top of the one before, ruining both.

After a little exploration of the buttons on my new digital camera, I finally know how to review my pictures. We couldn't do reviews at all with our old Kodak. We had to finish snapping all the pictures for that roll of film, package it up, send it to the developer, and two or three weeks later we would get our pictures back in the mail. People these days seem to take pictures of everything, selfies and all. Back in the day, it wasn't that easy, and it was expensive to buy film and to pay for developing and printing. So we were choosy about our occasions for picture taking. Ok, so cameras and phones actually go pretty well together!

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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Editorial on 10/05/2016