avrelia

One of my first memories is getting under a large cupboard to look at the box with red glass – my dad’s photo equipment. It seemed magical to me at the age 2. It seemed even more magical when I was six years old, and my dad allowed me to join him in the bathroom turned into the darkroom to witness the process of photo-printing. I remember watching in the red light an image slowly appearing on the white paper. When I turned 13 I had my own camera and did everything by myself. Not as well, and the surviving pictures still have some weird spots on them or generally underdeveloped, but I did the magic all by myself.

When I was 14 my best friend’s family got a VCR player. It was 1990, and it wouldn’t be in the news in USA, but in Russia, it was a height of technological marvels in our own life. She had only three movies for the first couple of month, and we watched them over and over… I still remember how much fun it was to watch Nightmare on the Elm Street backward. And forward. And fast forward. And Faster Forward. And stopping in random places. We had all the power! (if you are curious, the other movies were Tarzan with Val Kilmer and The Ghost with Patrick Swayze).

In a year my parents also bought a VCR player and that started new era of us running back and forth with our VCR players (rather large and bulky) to each other to copy one thing or another.

Some time later I got my own VCR camera and it became my faithful companion on family events and birthday parties, and outings with friends.

What about my photo camera? It existed. But it was uncool. I had a small camera that used new, color, film that had to be processed in special places. Turning bathroom into a darkroom and playing with the equipment and chemical reagents seemed bothersome – there were so many things to do, and black and white badly processed photos were not one of those.

Got my first cell phone in year 2000. it was the cheapest I could find, not the smallest or the coolest, just the barely working.

I had a new VCR camera, smaller and cooler, but I rarely wanted to use it. I was an adult, married, and living across the world from my parents and my old friends. And making simple recordings or sill videos didn’t seem that interesting at that moment.

The VCR player, however, was an important part of my life. First, DVDs were too expensive, and online was - well, not streaming. But VHS tapes were available from the library and then of course, one could buy blank ones and record from tv. I used to record Buffy and re-watch later several times to learn all the words and phrases I didn’t understand, and other series occasionally.

In 2003 we also bought our first digital camera. If wasn’t better than a regular one, but it was fun to have digital photos I didn’t have to print. Alas, who knew it won’t make them to be safer! They are not lost, but they are hidden in all our digital hoard.

Still the middle of the oughts was a fun time, technology-wise. Husband and me had two incomes and lots of free time and curiosity. We had a desktop, a laptop, a scanner, a printer, old film and new digital cameras, palm pilot, those cool motorola razr cell phones and an iPod and Zune to listen to music. I might be missing something (my first big purchase from the new well-paying job was a large monitor).

Out of all those riches we still have that scanner. Yes, it still works. But new computers refuse to find drivers for it.
In 2007 I had my first baby, and it signaled the time when we started talking outrages amount of photos. All digital.

In 2010 we moved to USA, leaving behind quite a lot of our old devices, or stopping using them. It was an era of smartphones.

this post started as a reblog fro Tumblr and then it grew and grew and overgrew the original idea.so, it came to live here.