Shooting stars

Last night I saw five shooting stars, and today I'm starting my first blog.

Is there a connection - who knows? I'll take it as a sign anyway, must remember not to burn out though.

I have a picture of my wife Dot and some friends on holiday in France, lying in the grass watching the midnight sky, all stars and candles, which I will post when I find the negative.

I've never seen so many people taking pictures as there are nowadays. When I first started taking photos on a Halina Paulette, probably fifty years ago, a roll of film would be bought for the summer hols in Cornwall, and I would still be using the same film at Christmas to photograph my mates building snowmen, igloos (we had drifts you could crawl into - and they did collapse, and we did get wet and cold) and sledging on the waste ground that still hadn't been built on.

But I was the only lad with a camera. And I still have prints and negatives from all that time ago.

My point is, what happens to all the photos being taken by amateurs and enthusiasts today?

I know that many never make it to the print stage, many are never archived onto hard drives or cd/dvd, they are deleted in camera or from the mobile phone once the subject has had a look and a giggle.. they are the shooting stars of the photographic world, a brief and possibly dazzling appearance, then wiped from existance in order to make space for the next digisnap.

The world is being documented like never before, but will enough of these images survive so that somebody in the future can try to make some kind of sense of it, so that whatever story is being written, future generations will have an archive of unparallelled proportions, from a far wider diversity of sources than ever before. Mr everydayman (and woman) are doing their bit to leave a mark.

Just remember to save some of it somewhere, so that we can have another look a bit later on.

Phil.

www.thesilverimage.co.uk