A Digital Camera and The Mind Of A Child...

How taking photographs has changed since the invention of the digital camera. I remember when I was a child I was never allowed to take photographs as it was never worth the money to develop the film for a handful of photographs of headless bodies and unrecognisable random snaps of scenery and sunsets.

Even now I'm not much better, but the big difference is the digital camera. A wonderful little camera that allows us to snap away happily and then go back and delete the headless bodies, half pets and any other photograph that was pointless, leaving only the worthwhile pictures.

My daughter loves to snap away with the camera and as long as she wears the "uncool" wrist strap, she can go off and let her imagination run wild with our blessing. With todays digital cameras it's not a problem as she can snap away at random for hours and then select what she wants to keep and she can delete what she doesn't want to keep.

It's good for her to go off and experiment, most of what she snaps are half snaps and pointless, but in her mind she is seeing something else. A lot of the time what she sees and what we see in a photograph are totally different. Most mean something to her, maybe a thought that was running through her head at the time she was taking the photograph or a feeling she was feeling. That is what photography is all about, helping us to hold onto memories, bringing back feelings and thoughts. If that is something she has realised at a young age, then who are we to tell her she can't keep her photographs, it's much better for her to use her imagination whilst snapping away rather than to let it fester in front of a screen for hours. The beauty of the digital camera is that we don't have to be harsh and stop her from snapping away because we begrudge the price it would cost to develop her photographs. All we have to do is upload her photographs to the computer and put them in a file for her to browse through or edit at her hearts content.

What she was thinking or where she got the idea for the way in which she took these photographs I have no idea. For Christmas last year she got a jewellery box with a small mirror on the inside of the lid. Off she went into the garden, jewellery box in one hand and digital camera in the other, she returned a while later with these photographs. How the minds of children work - she had decided that taking photographs of things she could see reflecting in the mirror of her jewellery box, in this case flowers, seemed like a good idea. It worked, very effectively, the flowers reflections were captured in the mirror and the mirrors edge creating a frame around the photographs giving the similar effect of looking through a window.

When she went out clutching the jewellery box and the digital camera, she probably wasn't sure as to what she was going to photograph and she had probably only taken the jewellery box with her because it was her Christmas present and that is what children do.