As promised in my previous post (Alone In The Dark), here is my post about what I call Kodak Moments. According to the Kodak, a Kodak Moment is “a rare, one time, moment that is captured by a picture, or should have been captured by a picture.” As you know, “a picture is worth a thousand words” and some moments are just too good (in whatever sense you may think of) to let fly by without immortalizing them with our cameras. Of course, you’d want to recreate the same emotion as the one you had at that moment when you go through these still images later. However serious, funny, silly, moving, sad or even tragic the moment may be, people find things that are important to them and make sure they capture it (in case they forget). It’s literally like taking a snapshot of life and keeping it for later. Things like a baby’s first steps, newlyweds cutting the cake, grandpa’s famous impression of Popeye’s face, a butterfly on a flower, crazy Halloween costumes, someone’s scared face on a roller coaster, a sunset over a corn field, a puppy sleeping with his mouth open or girls out on the town on Saturday night. And yes. You thought correctly. It is the latter one that I plan on talking about.

I’m sure you’ve seen this phenomenon everywhere by now. Everywhere you go, there are flashes going off like you just walked the red carpet. (Well, technically, if it’s a FeedBak event, you’ll see flashes go off too but we actually have a red carpet). You’ve probably been in one of the following situations:

• The place is somewhat packed and you’re just trying to work your way through the crowd. It’s tough because you’re bumping into people, stepping on feet, saying “Excuse me” every other step. Plus you’re holding drinks and taking them to your friends. Not 2 but 3 because it’s always harder to hold them steady with all 10 fingers. Next thing you know, you stumble into an opening. SWEET! As you try to steady your hands with the drinks, you notice a group of people on your right not moving and one person on your left holding something. And there it is. You just got caught in a middle of a Kodak Moment. People posing are now heckling you for ruining such a “priceless” picture. So you try to get out of the way as quickly as you can, preferably in the direction you intended or you just stand there and wait until the moment is over. You run into those numerous on your way back to  your friends.
• You’re just chilling, minding your business. And someone taps you on the shoulder and asks you to take a picture. Now it is your responsibility to capture the beauty and the emotion before you. You now have to improvise yourself as a photographer. You want to do a good job for a few of reasons:
  1. You want to be a good person and help a fellow human being.
  2. That picture might make it onto Facebook tomorrow. So you don’t want to embarass yourself by taking a crappy, blurry picture.
  3. You want to prove to yourself that you actually can operate technology as easy as a digital camera or even a phone.
  4. Let’s face it. Taking a picture for a group of girls is a great ice-breaker. You may get to hang with them afterwards.

  So you make sure that you’re not facing a bright light source, that the flash is on, that coast is clear (and noone will stumble in the way, holding drinks), that all girls are there and ready to say cheese. Here you go. 1. 2. 3. **CLICK!**. As the girls quickly huddle around the camera to review every detail within a few seconds, you better stick around. Chances are you’ll have to do a bunch of takes because there will be something wrong with the first couple of photos. Tina thought you were doing “1-2-CLICK” and not “1-2-3-CLICK”, Suzie was looking away, Jennifer made an ugly face, and some creepy dude was cheesing the background. Let’s do it again. And there you go again. What a Kodak Moment that was, right?

I guess the operative word in the definition are rare and one time. How many times can you throw a Peace sign? Or how many people in the same picture can throw a deuce at the same time? How many times can you and your girls do those classic group poses. You know, the one where you all squeeze in together; squeeze so much that your cheeks are pushing against your neighboring friends’. Or there’s the classy beauty pageant line-up where they all face one direction with one hand of the hip. And of course, my favorite: the big group squeezed together, cheeks together, making a pucker face, and the front row with their hands on their lap and their knees slightly bent.

It used to be that people would walk around with disposable cameras. You wind the thing up, take a few pictures and hope for the best. With the advent of cell phones and digital cameras, every moment is a Kodak Moment. If you go through your camera, you can probably recreate the whole night by putting them back to back thus building a full stop motion animation. Here is the narration.
“This is us getting ready at my house. This is us in the car on our way downtown. This is us in the car again but Suzie wasn’t looking. This is us walking to the bar. This is us with the doorguy, Mike. We stopped in the bathroom for another photo op. Then we went to the bar, here’s proof. We got our table, look at our bottles on the table. This guy came up and took a few pics of us all at the table then we let him be in one. Here we are on the dancefloor. Dancefloor. Dancefloor. That’s me and Suzie on dancing. More on the dancefloor. Then we took shots, they were kinda pinkish, see that? Then that dude grabbed my camera and took a bunch pics of our butts. How silly! Then the lights turned on. And Oh My God! Here is Jennifer making out with that dude, while Suzie is holding Kim’s hair as she was throwing up in the background.”
NOW, THAT LAST ONE WAS A KODAK MOMENT! Too bad, it won’t make the cut for your Facebook album.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]