Interest in still photography began to decline when movies were introduced to the world. By the time television made its debut, photography was really hurting. Oh, of course there were still markets for still photography: there were magazines -- "Life" and "National Geographic" being the notable standouts -- coffee table books, the occasional art gallery show, calendars, and of course the local police forensic lab, but motion was where the future was headed.
Ironically, the invention of digital photography briefly reinvigorated the form. Film was just so difficult to deal with. There was the bother of focusing, the bother of making sure you didn't accidentally open the back of the camera and expose all the film you'd already shot, the bother of sending the film in to a processor when you were done with a roll. Heck, the bother of changing rolls of film after every 24 or 36 shots.
That changed when the digital era bloomed. No longer did the casual shutterbug have to worry about silliness such as running out of film or worrying about whether the shot you thought you had taken was the one you actually took. Suddenly, the picture could be checked in seconds, color-balanced and cropped in moments, and uploaded to the Internet (motto: "Bringing you pictures of your neighbor's cat since 1998") for all to see.
Then came digital movie making. With the advent of the Christmas sales season, phones were coming equipped with full-motion capture, and still cameras could also shoot short movies. I discovered that my "pocket" camera could make movies almost as good as the best of the old 8mm cameras that Aunt Millie used to break out at Christmas in order to show everyone crackly home movies of her trip to the Grand Canyon back in '72.
For a very long time, I resisted entering the movie world. Okay, that's a lie. When I was in junior high, a couple of friends and I took one of those old Super 8s of Aunt Millie's and made a horror movie. There was a lot of running around and screeching. There may even have been some scary masks and some weird, Alfred Hitchcock-like experimental angles. Unfortunately, we'll never know for sure, because we didn't have any film for the camera.
The rest of the time, I was a still photography fella. I shot film wherever I went, of nearly everything and everybody I saw.
When digital came around, I took my time switching over, but once I did, I never looked back. I could still take pictures everywhere I went, but no longer did I have to spend nine hours a day in the photo lab developing all that film (sure, I could have sent it in to Wal-Mart's lab, but where was the fun in that?).
I still resisted movie making; my mother got a video camera before I did. To be honest, I didn't see the point. It wasn't like I was going to be making documentaries or getting my hand-shot horror movies shown in cineplexes around the country. There just wasn't any reason to get into it.
Then they invented You Tube.
I don't know who "they" were, but "they" were wise. "They" understood that, more than anything else in the world, people wanted to be able to put videos of their cats doing silly things out there where everybody could see them; ie: on the Internet (motto: "Making sure you have something to do at work since 2001").
You Tube meant that no longer did the aspiring amateur videographer or budding movie maker actually have to have production deal in place before making their movie. Heck, they didn't even have to have the hope that there might be an audience out there somewhere.
No, all they had to have was a camera, a will, and some free time to upload their mini-movies to the You Tube web site.
Since I had the second two (well, at least the free time), I decided to go ahead and get the third. A friend of mine was selling a high definition video camera he'd bought to document his Appalachian Trail hike and I, I needed a camera so that I could film a spoof of one of my favorite "reality" t.v. shows: "Ghost Hunters."
I haven't thrown away all of my other cameras just yet, but I have dived (dove? doven?) into the deep end of home videography. I've got plenty of video of cats, and pretty soon I'm sure that my You Tube movies will be watched by one, maybe even two people.
Aunt Millie would be proud.
Aunt Millie's name has been changed to protect the innocent and/or guilty. No one else's name has been changed, or, if it has, the author isn't admitting it.
[Below: A still photo of a video camera. Ironic, huh?]
And here's that promised YouTube video!