A tragic lesson for photographers
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<span style="float:left;margin:5px;">My sister-in-law Wanda and her husband Larry, expecting their first baby early this year, got a digital camera for Christmas.  So did my father-in-law Paul, who takes gorgeous film photos and was interested in the "unlimited number of shots" available with digital.  (I really am looking forward to seeing what he comes up with when he gets going.)  None of them is technically inclined at all - Paul, at least, <em>has</em> a computer, a Powerbook, but the new parents have nothing - so the cameras have been a bit of a challenge; but since <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/hpatey/sets/72057594076247560/">baby Jeremy</a> was born three weeks ago, many many pictures and little videos have been taken by Wanda and Larry, as you might expect.  Our family and theirs was visiting the mutual grandparents this Sunday, and Wanda figured this would be a good time to move the pictures off the camera onto Paul's computer to make room for more.  It turned out, though, that somehow all the pictures from the very earliest at Christmas until a few days ago had been deleted, and they hadn't noticed and had taken more onto the blank card.  Moreover, Paul hadn't "gotten around" to opening and setting up his camera, because he's like that, very reluctant to pick up anything new - much to the frustration of us who know how much he'd enjoy it.  Well, Wanda was devastated: hundreds of newborn-baby pictures vanished.  Many words were said and feelings hurt.  It was determined, at last, that it was just an accident, and there wasn't anything to be done about it.  Paul had taken a few film photos, but of course the presence of the digital made it seem unimportant at the time.
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At that point, I went into post-mortem mode, that I suppose I should have done at Christmas-time.  I marched Paul up to Costco where I made him purchase another card for Wanda's camera, and a card reader that would fit cards for both her and his camera.  I laid down the law: Wanda was to take as many foolish unimportant pictures as possible, as well as those of the baby, to get more used to the camera so it would be unlikely to happen again.  The extra card goes in Paul's wallet, and whenever he sees Wanda (a couple times a week) she will "make a deposit in the picture bank" by trading in her used card for the blank one. Paul would then go home and dump the card into his computer, using the reader so he wouldn't need her camera to do so, burn them to CD, and put the newly blank card back in his wallet.  I reasoned, no more than a week's worth of cash belongs in your purse; how much more valuable are the pictures?  That value was sadly demonstrated by this little episode, so this was agreed to as sensible by all, and I hope it works according to plan.  I also made Paul drag out the camera he got for Christmas and get set up, showing him how to charge the battery and use the reader to import the pictures with iPhoto and/or drag the folder from the external device onto the desktop.  I installed the iPhoto plugin for Flickr, so it shouldn't be too hard to get him to <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/64376893@N00/">post his pictures</a>, although it may only be done when I go to visit him and point at the screen.    Great, I have become the Nagging Old-Country Grandmother of technology.  Listen to me.  <em>"Back up your pictures or you'll lose them, haven't you got the grain of sense God gave a goat?"  "Is your virus scanner up-to-date, young man?"  "You're not going to open that attachment, are you?  Well, don't come crying to me..."</em> My fate is sealed.