Picture this...

When I was a pre-teen and young adult, I loved taking pictures.

I started with the Polaroid Swinger camera that belonged to my parents (remember you squeezed the red button and waited for it to say 'yes' inside the viewfinder?)

It was instant (three minutes, I think, I can't actually remember) but then you peeled off the little paper and had a black and white photo.

There was a little swab thing that you were supposed to use on the picture to keep it from fading or from curling up, but I never did.

Always just threw that away. I'd have to do some serious looking, but I may actually have some of those black and white photos in the bunches stored in my filing cabinets.

I have 30 years of photos that need to be in albums or scrapbooked. I used to keep up with it fairly well, but I'm ashamed to say I haven't done that for a very long time.

I'm in the process of trying to arrange things here so I *can* work on my photos. Have a great desk and a surprising amount of space in the Momcave, but I'm not quite able to keep things tidy enough to get going on the pictures lately.

Oh hell. I'm off on a tangent.

So my family had a Kodak 126 camera.
My mom signed me up for a photography class through 4H when I was in the 8th grade.

The instructor was a really nice person. She taught us a bit of composition, we took a couple photo field trips. We were required to use black and white film, though. I'm not sure how much that class helped me take better photos, I'm not really that good at it even today. I just don't have the eye.

It was expensive to buy film.
It cost money to develop it, too.

There were 36 exposures on a roll. After it was sent in to be developed, I had to wait 10 to 14 days for the pictures to come back. And all those 'great shots' I took? Usually there weren't any of them in the final prints.
Sometimes I'd get one that wasn't bad.

We usually had too much month at the end of the money, so my mom didn't allow me to take photos much.
I moved to Colorado to live with my maternal grandparents when I was a Junior in high school. I was really excited when I bought my own Kodak 110. I saved up for it for three months.

I still had to send the rolls of film in to be developed, and I had the same disappointment over the pictures I'd thought were going to be good and weren't, but I loved that little camera and the freedom to take as many photos as I could pay for.

I don't know what happened to that camera. Funny how things just sort of disappear.

So I was thinking about all that today. Remembering how I loved to take pictures and could never take as many as I wanted.

My thoughts were sent in that direction because I had some pictures from work that I needed to have printed.  I still had two kids to photograph in their 'cars'  for our 'going places' display, which I did last week. Today I printed the pictures.

I sat down here at my computer, stuck the little digital camera card into the reader and uploaded two photos to Snapfish. I sent them to the Walgreens up the street so I could pick them up when I went to the store today.

I knew when I uploaded them that the photos were good, since I'd seen them in my camera and on the computer. And in a new speed record, I received an email telling me that I could come pick up my pictures three minutes after I uploaded them.

So now I only print the photos that are good, I can get them very quickly and a digital camera is fairly inexpensive. Oh, you can get much more elaborate and amazing equipment, but for someone like me, it's great. I will never be an amazing photographer, but I am better at it than my mom, she cut off heads in photos so many times when we were growing up that people tried to take the camera from her when she attempted to photograph us.

"Here, let me do it, you always cut off their heads, " my dad would say to her.

I've been pondering the photos and memories so much that I'm motivated to finish clearing my desk and start working on albums/scrapbooks again.

So what are your photograph memories?
And do you love looking at old photos the way I do?