Digital Photography Child-Prodigy and a New Generational Standard

My brother was once asked by a friend of his in Russia, "Have you ever thought about getting a digital camera?" And he was candid about the cause of his reluctance: "I don't know - my brother recently got one, and he's already taken thousands of pictures of his beloved first-born." I think Ian was less than two years old at the time... Apparently his perception of a kind of obsessive compulsion on my part made him less eager to taste of the forbidden fruit of digital photography.

Luckily, Ian is showing a great deal more self-restraint, now that he has his own digital camera. Amy was agonizing about whether to get him a "real" digital camera for Christmas, but I was all for it, because I figured I'd have some help in chronicling every waking moment of our family life. And I was right. [Plus, Ian's pictures and videos are hilarious - especially his narrated videos, which have already made their debut on the Internet.] Needless to say, Ian was thrilled at his present, and has barely put it down since Christmas morning.

When Ian got hold of my camera, prior to this recent development, I would download pictures and find many megabytes of Mobius-strip material - basically pictures snapped every few seconds, so if you lined them up, you'd get a crude-but-reliable video of the scene in question - something rivaling the early days of cinematography, in terms of coverage and smoothness of flow. When we went to the Wiggles' concert at the Long Island Coliseum, Ian caught important footage - again, basically pictures that together constitute a video - of my arm on the steering wheel, Interstate 89 outside Hartford, and similar footage catching exciting movement on the opposite lane of the Long Island Expressway. It was incredibly funny to look over the pictures, especially if you clicked one after another in quick succession so you could capture all the Interstate action as it unraveled.

But now he has his own, so we have very faithful coverage of puppies play-fighting, me looking bald, Amy looking tired, Daniel and Madeleine in their natural habitat, and - very importantly - pictures of pictures of Ian, Daniel and Madeleine.

But the numbers speak for himself. Ian asked me to download his pictures last night, and there were 447, taken over the eight days that he had the digital camera. This morning, the number was up to 489. And when he reaches the magic number of 1,000 (which he checked with me, to make sure it was the number right after 999), he wants to have a celebration.

Young Ian is Alexander, to my paltry Philip of Macedon, in the realm of digital documentation, as in all other things.

(January 15, 2011)