Today I did family portraits for some friends we’ve known for many years.  They reminded me that it had been 6 years since I did their last portrait.  One look at their kids today drove that point home in stunning fashion.  In my mind, they were fixed at their ages and appearances when I took their last portrait.  I blinked today and there they stood, before my eyes, 6 years taller, handsomer, prettier, and more mature.

 

I had let several years go by without taking our own family portrait until last year, when I finally made it happen.  When I compare the faces in that portrait to the faces in the previous portrait, there were some big changes but, fortunately, the changes took place more gradually — through several blinks.  Even though I didn’t take a whole-family portrait during that time, I did take many candid photos of my family — a feat due, in part, to the availability of digital cameras.

 

Seven years ago I got my first digital camera.  With that purchase, the economics of taking photographs changed radically, reducing the marginal cost per picture to nearly free.  With that economic freedom, I began taking more pictures — even frivolous and silly ones — and I’m so glad I did.  The photograph here was one of the first ones I took with my first digital camera.  The little toddler in this picture has now just started 4th grade, and my daughter is now applying to go to college.  This image is a treasure to me, and reminds me that shutter clicks are a lot like eye blinks — they fix in our minds (or on film, or in 1’s and 0’s) a moment, an expression, a description, a relation, an event.  

 

There is a fusion frequency above which our minds will regard as continuous a sequence of still images passing before our eyes.  Movie cameras sometimes go as low as 24 frames per second, and yet we perceive that as smooth motion.  I don’t know what the fusion frequency is for the growth of our children.  How often do we need to take pictures of our kids before we no longer blink startlingly, but regard their progress as continuous?  In some cases, it may be yearly; our annual school pictures sometimes show relatively little change (beyond lost teeth, changes of hair length, etc.) between two successive pictures.  In other cases, maybe it is a matter of months or weeks or (when they’re very young) days.

 

I’ve blinked a lot over the last several years, and consider it a blessing to have a “blinker”, and a treasure to have all these blinks.