How many pics, you said?

When I travel, there are a lot of items in my check list. Things like tooth brush, shaving kit, the two million different chargers, clothes, ticket, suitcase, etc. And thanks to Osama 'Nutcase' Laden I have another list which has things I shouldn't be taking. Which includes perfumes, water, AK-47's, pipe bombs, wife and kids. The one thing to take, which is in every bodies list about twice, is a camera. Mind you, my whole travel plan could be cancelled without this key item.

Cameras were invented over three centuries back and have come a long way since then. The first ones were as big as an American. It just sat around in one place ordered hot dogs and double cheese burgers. Nowadays, the smallest one is the size of Paris Hilton's brain. The one's that can be fit into reading glasses.

I have always roamed around with a camera for the past ten years. Film cameras are pretty expensive when you take the film and printing costs into account. This is where my uncles photo studio helped me a lot. I always made sure that there is a camera in my car, rather than petrol. Film cameras made life easy. As you take pictures of only important things, considering the limited availability of rolls. A typical holiday couple would come back with 36 pictures. Only to find out that the guy did not load the roll properly. It always happened to me. Even in automatic loading cameras.

Once the digital camera became practical, things changed. People put in 4GB memory cards and took 1TB hard drives as backup. What was once a 36 picture per trip, now became 360 pics per hour trip. In fact you can make a motion picture with the number of pictures taken. I for instance take 3 pics for each shot. Because I am sure 2 of them will be messed up. After the trip or event I spend a decade trying to delete the ones not needed. Ending up with about 1000 valid pics.

The problem here is clicking random pics hoping for a nice shot. In the end that also ends up sitting on your hard drive, because you don't want to delete them. I usually have a back up of the pics on my hard drive. And another back up in a portable hard drive. As my Dell's hard drive had died more times than it has spun. Plus I have another back up on DVD's. Just because I like everyone else, don't want to loose them. But I am sure the portable hard drive will also fail soon and, I will loose my DVD's too. This is where Face book and Orkut comes into pictures. It will have all your pictures safe and sound with the million comments. Unless of course, their servers decide to kill themselves because of stupid status updates.

As of today I have over 15 GB worth of pictures. It would take an entire life time to see all of them. Which means I can get to it only after I retire. That's if I live to that point. Anyone who sees their old pictures, ends being disappointed. They find that they are now more fat, old and are balding.

I don't even want to get into video camera's. It's just a waste of money as still camera's themselves have video capability too. This is how it goes. People buy a video camera once they have a kid to record their every move and all the birthday parties, which no one will ever see. One fine day the kid himself will break the camera.

We take pictures for different reasons. One reason is to upload it on Face book, tag every object in the picture and see what the world has to say. That's a Face book law which has to adhered to, or they'll cancel your account. Another, is because we have to. Next, is for memories. How many times have people actually gone back to see old pictures? The answer would be zero. Because they can't. They wont remember about them. Even if their memory is good, the hard disk isn't.