Let's See What Develops

Something else I miss...the little thrill of going to the drugstore or Sav-No-More to pick up photographs. See, back in the day, you'd take your pictures at family gatherings, supermarket openings, weddings and coronations on a film camera, and then you'd take the roll of film to whatever store and they would send the film off to the lab and then, in three or four days you'd come back and pick up the pix. Now, we take the pictures on a digital camera, pull out a teeny memory card (and lately I do have a teeny memory) and pop that into the pc, digitally altering the photo all we care to, and then electronically send it off to MegaMart.com, and then hop in the pick-em-up truck and run over to the 'Mart and park and run in and pick 'em up. The difference is, of course, that we KNOW what the pictures of Uncle Albert and Aunt Halsey will look like. It used to be quite exciting to race out of the store and peel open the gummy flap on the envolope that held your prints, and then look them over (edges only, please!)


Miss Pancake works in the medium of black and white photography as an art form in school; she loathes digital cameras, but she develops her own photos, so at least she gets the fun of sloshing the paper and the film in the photographic developing fluid and seeing the image materialize before her eyes. Therefore, she must also get that movie-kind of redlight darkroom thrill like they used to get in detective pictures when the evidence linking the crooked bank examiner to the heist came to light. Or like in this case: it looks like the guilty parties are that new family down the street.

You just never know, on the crime beat.