Anecdote within an Anecdote With a Few Pictures

Recognize this butt ?  What you don't?  Haha it's okay you probably don't. Ignore the date on the picture (sometimes cameras get the wrong date) but this was actually a student's art piece at Dominican University.  This was when I went to visit universities in  Northern California. That should ring a bell. Believe we went here in April of 2014! That's crazy! I feel like it's been longer than that. But them again it is almost 2016!

Okay now to the actual topic of this post... Photography! So I remember before I went on the Northern California College Trip, I asked my parents if I could have a digital camera so I could take pictures because I remember at that time I had a cheap phone and the camera quality wasn't the best and well I really wanted to take pictures. (And I lowkey missed my old digital camera, I owned a digital camera back in 2011 it was a Nikon digital camera that was touch screen and it was pretty awesome!) So they were like but cameras are really expensive luckily my sister chimed in that they sold cheap cameras at Kmart so we went. And I bought a cheap one, I wasn't so content since the brand was Vivitar and I had never heard of that brand before. It was only like 9 MP but I bought it anyways. I mean a camera is better than no camera right?

Well apparently not to my 16 year old self. I don't know why but when I was around the ages of 15-16 I was very concerned about being updated with technology. Here's an example. When I was 15, instead of having a quincenera like any Mexican girl, I went on a three day trip to Catalina Island with my parents and my sister. On that trip, my family and I owned phones which were pretty much outdated for today, they were non touch screen and had a low quality camera . My parents always like taking pictures ya know for memory like any other parent. I remember being on a tour in a jeep with my family and an older couple (I think they were in their 60s) and in this moment I noticed the technological gap between my parents and that elder couple who were older than my parents ironically. The elder couple was taking pictures of the landscape with either a digital camera or their smart phone while my mom took a picture of the landscape with her nonsmart phone and my dad didn't take any pictures because he got so frustrated with his old phone.  I don't know why but in that moment I felt so embarrassed. Well I do but I'm straying too far off topic. This little anecdote might turn into another discussion of materialist obsessions. Well the point is. I felt so embarrassed that my family didn't have such technology. They didn't have smartphones or digital cameras.

Well this post has gone on for too long so I'll try to make this short. So back to my original discussion. When I was on that trip with my little 9 MP camera, I felt so inadequate and so out of touch. You see I knew how to use smartphones and digital cameras but I just didn't have any. Everyone on that trip either had a smartphone or a digital/professional camera. My camera was so basic compared to theirs. Every time I took a picture it made a noise while the other kids' cameras didn't. Every time I wanted to get a good picture I had to make sure I was still and as far away as possible in order to get a good picture while the rest of the kids just had to have their phones a bit far back and effortlessly got a good picture. The worst part was that the tour guides rarely stopped which meant I rarely had time to take good pictures. I never looked back at those photos because I lost the camera was pretty sure the pictures came out ugly.

A decent photo taken at Stanford with my 9 MP camera

But  one year later I found that 30 dollar camera and I took out the micro SD card and I looked back at those pictures, most of them were blurry (mainly because every time I took a  picture it made a noise and I either got embarrassed or felt rude so I quickly tried hiding my camera) but there are a few pictures which actually came out decent. Well what I really wanted to say with this story is that sometimes the price of a camera or brand of a camera doesn't really matter. Sometimes a 30 dollar camera can take pretty good pictures if the person behind it actually takes the time to take a good shot.