I was talking with some friends last weekend about polaroids. Apparently they are being discontinued to encourage digital photography as the main media for accessing instant photos. My one friend, in particular, was concerned about how this would affect our documentation. There is something about holding a photo developed from film that is really special to me and my friends now. We all love polaroids and that element of surprise that comes out of watching the photo appear. It's even more fun to go to the store and pick up photos developed from a disposable or roll of film. For some reason it's just not the same to have a picture printed out from a digital camera.
I think about photographs and how important they are to the way in which I remember things and it scares me to think those memories could just be deleted. Everyone has a digital camera now but for me an my friends these photos have less meaning. With a digital camera you can just take a lot of pictures and delete them, but with film you can't take back what you have done. Each spot in a roll is more permanent and it will produce something you can hold that makes you think of the exact moment in which it was taken. In a lot of ways it's more of a possession.
The weekend of the beer scavvy my friends and I finished two disposable cameras. When we got them developed there were certain pictures I wanted to take with me. Even though we could have just scanned them all and put them on facebook there's something much more personal about having the photo on your real wall then having on your facebook wall. I know I'm sort of ranting but I guess I'm just a little sad that a form of documentation so important and cool is being obliterated by the more modern one.