Thank You Camera Phone

My 20-year-old ne’er-do-well sister has a $1,000 Nikon camera that she uses to take selfies with on vacation. I have an iPhone which I use to capture centuries-old cathedrals, cerulean seas, wrinkly locals, and flaky pastries.

A couple years ago, this would have really bugged me, since before the time of the iPhone all us reject kids had to use was disposable cameras. Unfortunately, this caused me to miss out on timeless photos from my earlier trips like my first visit to Europe when I went to Norway to meet my long-lost family, a tour of Colorado where we drove from Denver to Ouray to take a look at the wild ponies and the Continental Divide, and my 18-year-old jumping-in-with-both-feet trip backpacking across Europe armed with one other confused teenager.

These are trips I will always look back on with a smile and read about teenage angst and newness in my old journals, but unfortunately, there really aren’t photos to represent the fog over an early mountain morning or the freeze of a Norwegian lake in the summertime.

However, thanks to the advent of the smart phone, social media blew up, public information went mad, and the world became more interconnected than ever before. But one thing we sometimes forget about in the smart phone, even the camera phone, is that suddenly, everyone had the chance to capture their own images without a $1000 budget and a photo degree.

I’m not saying that my college roommate has anywhere near as much photography talent, skill, and knowledge as a professional photographer with a budding portfolio – as a trained journalist, I know how annoying it is when people think that when it comes to the arts, it all comes easy and any kind of creative education is worthless. But what I am saying is that I think it’s pretty cool that my college roommate has as much Internet opportunity as anyone else does to capture, edit, and share their images with the world, even if only her grandma and her dad really appreciates them.

A blossoming opportunity for all will never be a bad thing. Instead, now when I venture off to see the world, I’m not hoping that my disposable camera film doesn’t run out or that the photos are too dark – instead, I feel confident to grab every lame sunset and every towering peak, lighten up every color and define every line so that not only can I show my mom the cool places I went, but I can look back on journeys that barely need words alongside them.