WHERE DID ALL THE FILM GO?

AT SOME POINT VERY SOON, I'LL FINISH THAT LIST OF BISBEE PHOTOGRAPHERS. I PROMISE. However, right now I'd like to share a few thoughts with you concerning the evolution, read that revolution, that photography has undergone in the last two or three decades. I'd like to share a few incidences that illustrate just how far we've come. The first concerns two female co-workers. This incident occurred about twenty to twenty five years ago. A gentleman (read that geek) from what passed as an enformation technologies department came into the office with a camera. When he attempted to photograph the two ladies, they protested that they did not want their pictures taken. The geek's response was that there wasn't even any film in the camera, The lady's promptly began playing to the camera, reassured that they weren't really being photographed. Now the fact is that it probably seems incredible to you that these two women wouldn't have caught on that a camera held by a computer geek was quite capable of taking their picture without film. The fact is that digital photography at that time was such a novelty that these two women never considered the possibility. On the other hand, a friend of mine was recently photographing her grandson with a film SLR when he ran up to her asking to see his picture on the LCD screen. When told that there was none such, the little guy was quite disappointed. What kind of phony baloney camera didn't have an LCD screen? The times, they are a changin'. About three years ago I was pulled over by a highway patrolman. It turned out he wanted advice about purchasing a new camera to replace a digital point & shoot that had recently bought the farm. I asked him how many megapixels he felt he'd need. He informed me that the old camera was a one megapixel but he figured he should maybe upgrade to two. Well, I'm sure lots of passersby assumed that I was getting a traffic ticket while I stood there patiently explaining to the cop the realities of speeding (as in the digital world is speeding along the information highway at about a thousand miles an hour). It doesn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowin', It's blowin' in the direction of gigapixels.