I recently moved out of my parents house and was going through my old things from high school (I graduated in 2002..right before cell phones became popular) and found a bunch of pictures that I had developed in my last few years of high school.

Seeing those pics brought back some of the best memories I have ever had. Then I got to thinking, cell phone and instagram pics are a dime a dozen. People take pictures ever single minute of every single day and I think this makes this not personal at all. I always used to hear "A picture is worth a thousand words" but did not realize the power of that phrase until I saw my old high school pics.

These days with kids and teens taking so many pics, the pictures have lost all meaning. There are no imperfections to these pics, you can retake a pic over and over again until you get the perfect pic. This defeats the purpose of that "exact" moment the pic was taken.

Back in my day, we had to wait till they developed and hope that they came out well and majority of the time, the ones that didn't come out as you hoped are the ones that bring the best memories.

I feel sorry for these teens now, they will never see the joy of these things as camera phones have ruined something for them that they never even got to really got to appreciate.

On a side note, I found some notes from girls (see what I did with the "side note" hehe) and no matter how sweet a text a boy sends to a girl or a girl sends to a boy, teens this age will never have that nervous smile on their faces as I did when I read a note from a girl that liked me.

So all in all, I am so glad I lived in an age of pics that needs to be developed and an age where nervously handing a note to a girl with your sweaty palms was the best part of the day :)

Thanks for reading and please let me know how you feel.

Yeah, digital photos today lack that spontaneity found in older photographs. Back in the day you could also destroy photos you didn't like, today on the net they last forever.

I agree 100% not to mention nobody even gets prints anymore. Just hundreds of pictures stuck on a hard drive. It's just too easy to take a picture now. I see posts on Facebook all the time of people showing off on European vacations, out partying, etc and all the pictures look horrible. Grainy, blurred, all because they were taken from a smart phone. Gonna look back and wish you used a SLR. Same goes for video, instead of those long 20 minute home videos of years back, everything is 10 second snippets.

I thought about that after I watched the Kids React video with a film camera. They didn't even know why where people store their online photos is called an album.

Agreed. People really need to stop taking selfies. Especially if a tragedy just occurred liked a hostage situation, a plane crash, or a fire (yes, people actually do that). People also need to stop taking pictures when they should be enjoying the moment. Kind of hard to enjoy life when you're looking at it through a cell phone.

On an unrelated note, how is it that you just moved out of your parent's house 12 years after graduating high school?

While I agree with you guys about old school photos and how they relate to our past I see our current photo-crazy generations setting the stage for a whole new way to see the past that may have unforeseen effects in the near future.

The way we relate to each other as strangers is changing very fast.