The end of paper park maps

We should open a glue factory.

I have 22000 photos/videos on my phone. The future is weird.

I am at the other end of the spectrum - I have a total of 25 on my phone. And that dates back to 2014. I upload everything to a hard drive.

Hey (hey) you (you) get offa my [digital] cloud

Shades:

I have a total of 25 on my phone. And that dates back to 2014. I upload everything to a hard drive.

Ski places have also started to phase out paper trail maps as well. Most still have them at guest services on request but they don't stock them around the mountain in lift lines or ticket windows (which are also being phased out) like they used to.

This started around 2020 and a lot of people relocated to live at ski reports in the pandemic. An interesting marketplace opened up where they all wanted vintage trail maps to put in their new mountain homes. So if you look on ebay, old maps go for anywhere from $50 to several hundred dollars a pop. I've always collected both park and trail maps so could have a fortune on my hands if I was up to part ways with them.

When I have company and I want to show them photos of an family event or trip, I pull out the iPad and let them scroll, or even better, if everyone in the room is in on the conversation, I show them the pictures on the living room AppleTV. We live in the 2020s now. Picture albums are for old people. Or maybe they are just too fancy for me. YMMV

But my love for paper maps make me understand the nostalgia of a simpler time with paper maps and paper photos. When I was a young man, I visited AAA a few times a year to browse through the brochures of amusement parks and other interesting places. I would explain to the travel agents, "My hobby is amusement parks. Can I take some park brochures?" Until they got to know me, then they knew. I loved my huge collection of maps and brochures more than anything.

My punk rock band friends thought it was a strange hobby.

LostKause:

if everyone in the room is in on the conversation, I show them the pictures on the living room AppleTV

In the 70's, my parents would bust out the slide projector. Same idea but a lot easier to do now.

Beat me to it. I was wondering if anyone else had some of their family memories etched onto slides. We literally had a big screen to set up in the family room, and somewhere there are boxes of slides from the first seven years of my life.

Now I need to know what happened to those, the screen, and the projector.

Yup, sister and I have a few boxes of slides. I have the projector and a few years ago bought a NOS bulb for it off ebay (nothing being manufactured now) .. it worked great, for 6 slides, before going pffft. At some point I'm going to look into getting a digitizer for them.

Super 8 for us. At one point my folks had a lot of the Super 8 reels transferred to VHS, which I think we watched once as a family. We may have had a slide projector for pictures, but I'm not positive.

I too thought of the old slides. Whenever someone took a trip, there was always a big family get together at grandma/grandpa's house so that everyone could see the slides. I suppose I was pretty bored by it when I was an 8 year old, but thinking back on it now, how awesome it was that we all got together to do this.

My dad was a camera-phile and we had trays and trays of slides. Then reels and reels of home movies. After my folks were gone my brother and I were faced with the decision to either go through it all or pitch em. I’m sorry to say we made the chore easy for ourselves and not without a tear in our eyes. I’d love to have those movies of family vacations, especially Cedar Point and Busch Gardens in the early 60’s.

kpjb:

I'm always surprised by people that will return emails when they're off. Screw that.

Responding to work emails after I have left for the day is not expected, and I have notifications turned off for all things work, but sometimes responding off the clock can be beneficial. If I don't, by the time I get into the office, a small problem has ballooned into a 67 message thread, with multiple solutions set in motion, non of which are correct, and my morning is shot fixing a problem that could have been solved with a once sentence email the night before. In those moments, I am ok with taking 30 seconds to respond because I know the company will make up for it later. But I also have those nights where I say "Screw it. That is future Chris's problem." and I go back to drinking my old fashioned.

We got our first digital camera as a wedding present. Took it on our Hawaiian cruise honeymoon, and shot tons of pictures.

When we got home, I took those digital files to a photomat, got them turned into 4x6 pictures, stuck them in a photo album and deleted the digital pictures.

I had no idea what I was doing.

I did the same! Got my first digital camera (Fujifilm) for Christmas 2004 and had an xd card with it that had the capacity of around 50-60 pictures so I would get them developped (still made 4x6 picture albums back then!), transfer them on my computer and delete them so I could take more! The cards were expensive at first and then became cheaper so I would just buy more and keep them as backup. As time went on I started (like many) to take so many pictures and dropped developing them.

I took my first nice digital camera that I got for my birthday to Geauga Lake when I was in high school. That first SD card had capacity for about 20 pictures, which was about the same as a roll of film or disposable camera. I took some (what I thought were) carefully crafted shots, put the camera back in the car, and then went back in the park to ride.

I couldn't believe how cool it was that I could not only see the photos I had just taken but then go home that night and scroll through them on our shared home PC, save them to the desktop, clear the camera and then take 20 more pictures.

My first digital was the Nikon Coolpix 950, which I think was Time's machine of the year or something. It was a grand, but at 2.1 megapixels, it was usable for great photos online and printed. I bought it to take photos at IAAPA 2000 in Atlanta.

Cameras got cheaper very fast after that. I remember even college kids had them just two years after that. Phone cameras were pretty bad for indoor use until maybe 2012 or so. They were fine outside, but yikes, not so much indoors.

A while back, I found my family's first digital camera. Mom worked as in advertising at the local newspaper, and so we had one of the first available digital cameras on the market. I'm looking at it right now. Sony Mavica. It uses 3.5" floppy discs. Up to 0.3 megapixel pictures and has a 10X optical lens. It's a really cool piece of my family's history that served us well.

I still have most of all my digital cameras! They were all point and shoot. My favoriteone was my Lumix I don't remember the model but had a flip screen for selfies! That was a pretty cool feature!