Waiting for the Pictures |
A few weeks ago, we celebrated our granddaughter Sarit’s bat mitzvah. It was a wonderful simcha. Sarit delivered a beautiful dvar Torah that focused on a mishnah in Pirkei Avot that she had studied with me. There was dancing, good food, and a lot of family in attendance to mark the occasion.
Of course, there was also a photographer to capture the moment.
And with the technology available today, the photos being taken were immediately projected onto a large screen, allowing guests to see them almost in real time.
What a difference from just a couple of decades ago, when one had to wait weeks—sometimes even months—to see the photographs from a simcha.
There was a time—not so very long ago—when taking a photograph required patience.
Before phones became cameras that live in our pockets, we carried actual cameras. They had weight to them, a small satisfying feature. You opened the back, carefully slid in a roll of film, threaded it across the take-up spool, and hoped you had done it right.
Then you closed the camera and began counting: 24 exposures, maybe 36 if you splurged on the larger roll.
Each click of the shutter mattered.
You couldn’t take dozens of pictures of the same moment and sort them later. Every frame cost something. You aimed carefully, asked people to squeeze closer together, and hoped the lighting was decent, making sure you had the flashcube sitting on top of your camera (remember flashcubes?). Someone inevitably blinked. Someone else stepped out of the frame at the wrong moment. But you didn’t know that yet.
And sometimes the problems were even bigger. A finger would wander in front of the lens and create a mysterious pink blur in the corner of every picture. Or someone would forget to advance the film properly, resulting in two completely different images awkwardly superimposed on top of each other—Grandma standing in the living room while, somehow, a beach scene floated across her shoulder.
And, of course, there was always one mysterious photo of the floor or the ceiling, taken accidentally while putting the camera away.
After the roll was finished, the waiting began.
Sometimes you dropped the film off at a local photo shop. But many of us slipped the little black cartridge into a prepaid envelope and mailed it off to a processing plant somewhere far away. Then we waited. A week. Two weeks. Sometimes longer.
During that time, the photographs lived only in memory. We tried to recall what we had captured—the birthday cake, the vacation beach, the family gathered around the table.
When the envelope finally arrived in the mail, it felt like opening a small treasure chest.
Inside were the glossy prints and the strip of negatives. We would spread the photos across the kitchen table and examine them one by one. And that’s when the surprises appeared.
Someone had red eyes glowing like a startled raccoon. A carefully posed group photo revealed that Uncle David’s head had been neatly chopped off by the frame. The picture you thought would be perfect was blurry, while an accidental shot turned out beautifully. And occasionally there was the ultimate disappointment: an entire roll of photographs that came back completely blank because the film had never caught properly on the spool.
But that was part of the magic. The photograph was a discovery.
Today, of course, the process is entirely different. We snap a photo with our phones and glance at it seconds later. If it isn’t perfect, we delete it instantly and take another. And another. And another.
In some ways, the story of photography mirrors the pace of our lives. We have grown accustomed to immediate gratification. Emails arrive instantly. Text messages appear the moment they are sent. Food cooks in minutes in a microwave. Information travels across the world in seconds.
We expect results right away.
But there was something quietly wonderful about the old way of taking pictures. The waiting created anticipation. The uncertainty added a touch of mystery. And the moment when those photographs finally arrived carried a small thrill that no instant preview can quite replace.
Perhaps the lesson of those old film envelopes is that not everything in life needs to appear immediately on a screen.
Sometimes the best moments in life are the ones we wait for.