Mega-Pixel Holiday Memories - Steve Rosenbaum - MediaBizBloggers

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Cover image for  article: Mega-Pixel Holiday Memories - Steve Rosenbaum - MediaBizBloggers

Hey, can you spare a mega-pixel? What is that exactly? It's the thing that Nikon and Canon and Sony keep telling me I need more of. And as we're now in the shopping frenzy known as the Holiday Season, I find that there is a steady stream of glossy, sexy offers for new digital devices to capture these illusive pixels and save the forever.

The truth is - I want to.

So, I decided to think for a minute about why. On Thanksgiving Day, my family traveled to my Mom's house in Rhode Island. And, as the oldest male - I was handed the electric carving knife. There's only one time of the year that this comes out, and the knife itself is full of memories. The sound of it, the smell of the Turkey fresh out of the oven, the vibration of the knife - though I'm not sure if I've ever held it before. All these memories are of my father - and his holding it and carving the turkey.

My brother, as you would expect in a family of literary and digital documentarians, held my Canon 7d DSLR and recorded the ceremonial use of the electric knife. Then we sat to eat, the mega-pixels carefully organized on 16 megabyte compact flash card.

Later that holiday weekend, my wife, younger son and I sat down to watch Toy Story 3. It should come as no surprise that the film has massive mega-pixels of memories. The toys are recorded and remembered with such extraordinary detail. The plastic sheen of Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head. The impossibly perfect hair of Ken and Barbie, the metallic clang of Slinky Dog. But oddly, the thing that seemed most perfect was the unnamed rolling telephone The Fisher Price toy with the wooden body, pull string, and plastic phone handle was rendered with shape, sound, and physics so perfectly that I remember pulling it down a hall when I was maybe four or five years old. I remember it clearly, the pressed wood, the wide eyes that bobbed when you pulled it, the clicking wheels.

It doesn't exist anymore of course; the idea of a phone receiver has been replaced by an iPhone and an ear bud. But Pixar created the mega-pixels, animated them, and turned my memory back into a digital thing.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kzKCjzEwwY

So it could come as no surprise that this holiday season, folks will be snapping up the DSLR's - and gathering up the mega-pixels as fast as they can. Soon we'll be recording objects and events in 3 dimensions - capturing moments that we can the return to in 3d. Sound is already part of the DSLR, and certainly other data like temperature, even smell can't be that far behind.

Thanksgiving always reminds me of the smell of my father's pipe. And while I can remember it, it's captured in my internal memory. But it's hard to share from there. I'd like to have recorded it, and him, in a form that I could share with my children, and they with theirs.

The more I think about mega-pixels, the more of them I want to capture and store.

Steve Rosenbaum is founder and CEO of Magnify.net, and the Author of the forthcoming McGrawHill Business book "Curation Nation" (March / 2011). Steve can be contacted at steve@magnify.net Follow Steve Rosenbaum on Twitter: www.twitter.com/magnify

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