"What's a negative?"

It would be one thing if we were doing math or if our behavior or mood were negative, but at the time it was a completely different scenario. When Noble asked me, "What's a negative?" I admit my first thought, very first in a split second was, how does one of my children not know what a negative is? But in the other half of that second I realized their world, much like my world compared to my parents, is different than mine. I came into the world, much to my mothers amazement, knowing how to program a VCR.

I explained to Noble the concept of film in a camera compared to a SM card. I compared seeing the proof on the computer or the back of the camera to the negative. He wondered aloud to himself why we would develop pictures that way. His questions stayed in my mind for sometime as we sorted through that moving box of pictures that I remembered packing nearly three years ago sitting in the basement of our Salt Lake house. Noble was simply asking if he should throw an empty photo envelope away and I responded "make sure there are no negatives in it." And I felt our worlds separate just a little with his return question.

Photography is obviously a giant part of my life. I own two quite expensive cameras for a stay-at-home-Mom. I take nearly one hundred pictures a month and that is the quiet months, not birthday or holiday months - that can be nearly one hundred a week! I realized as my thoughts wandered that the box of pictures we were going through were at least three years old. Noble was five - was he really five the last time I used my original 35 mm exclusively? That was when I made the switch. Up until then, I had gone back and forth between film and digital and always gone back to the film. Convinced it would weather the techy stage, I loved the at home feel of that camera in my hands and the digital just felt flimsy and not like a "real" camera. And then sometime, somewhere, I made the switch about 3 years ago, probably when I got the nice digital that functions like my 35mm.

Not too long ago I opened the nightstand drawer and saw my beloved 35mm film camera there in it's gentle and precious holding place. It was like seeing an old friend and I picked it up and held it. It still feels like a piece of me, an extension of my arm. But the ease of digital, the ability to correct my own pictures, the tiny storage space of electronic pictures verses moving boxes full - it's freeing to stick with digital.

I wonder if someday my grandchildren will ask their father, "Dad what's an SM card, CD-R, etc.?"