Isn’t this photo amazing? You couldn’t recreate it if you tried.

This photo was obviously taken at a baseball game, so there was no doubt lots of cameras around, but it got me to thinking how much of our lives nowadays are recorded because of how readily available storage has become.

As storage space becomes more and more cheap, will there come a point in time where almost no point of our lives won’t be recorded. Today, using some simple technology and the storage capacity you probably own already, you could record every conversations you have for a week.

In twenty years from now will people be recording everything they hear, say and see, a la Justin.TV, simply because they don’t want to miss recording a golden moment? How will this impact people’s memories of moment? Will memories be more poignant and important because of that?

When I was 19, I spent six months living in the US as a snowboard instructor. This was before the days when digital cameras were affordable, so I had a simple Kodak film camera. It was brilliant, I could easily put it in my pocket and take photos of my pathetic attempts at freestyle snowboarding, the parties I went to and the beautiful sites I saw. In the six months I was there, I got my way through four 24 shot films. That is 96 photographs, some people, Simone McDermid I am looking at you, post that many from a night out with friends.

When I got back to Australia from my US trip and developed my photos I dutifully wrote on the back of them, threw out the badly shots ones and put the good ones into a photo album. I still look at that album. The memories are still so very real. The moments I remember. Perhaps that is because I didn’t spend many of those moments behind a camera lens, maybe because our mind only needs a few pointers to make us remember? I am not sure.

I recently spent three months travelling through Central Asia and China. I took a considerable number of photos, sometimes 200 a day, which I edited down and posted on Flickr. The time spent behind the lens on this trip compared with my trip to America would have been 100 fold or more even though it was only half as long. The recent trip is still vivid in my memory, but I wonder how it will compare down the track.

Will the sheer number of photographic memories of the trip help me better remember the trip to America with hardly any evidence? I am not sure. What do you think?

HT – Masami Kito for alerting me via Posterous to this image.