When I first moved to Lewiston, I took a lot of photographs.

Here’s my first apartment on Nichols Street! Those holes in the walls were there when I got there, mind you. Don’t try charging me for that crap.

Here’s my favorite downtown bar! Here’s my first girlfriend, my second girlfriend and a woman who followed me home from the Goose. Here’s my third girlfriend, the one I swore I would marry. Note how she’s hurling all of my belongings into a hockey bag. She does it out of love, I think.

I took a photo of the Sun Journal office on Park Street, too. Gosh, it would sure be nice to work there someday. I took photos in and around Kennedy Park and I took photos along the famed Lisbon Street strip. Here’s a picture of large, snarling drunk man with outstretched hands. After that I didn’t have a camera anymore, so my Lewiston: The Early Daze scrapbook is rather puny.

Back then, cameras used rolls of film with either 12 or 24 exposures. To get your photos, you had to take your roll to a qualified film developer and then wait approximately six weeks to get your pictures back. Finally, you’d walk away with a fat packet of photos, most of them blurry beyond recognition and at least a half dozen of them photos of your thumbnail.

With photos in hand, because you had no personal life whatsoever, you’d rush home and arrange your photos carefully into an album, trapping them forever between a clear sheet of paper and a sticky background. You’d write clever captions for your photos (which would smear terribly because, come on. You can’t write on that sticky background, fool) so that future generations would understand exactly what you were all about.

CANALS IN LEWISTON! IF ONLY I COULD PHOTOGRAPH SMELLS!

ME AND PAM AT THORNCRAG! WEDDING DATE COMING SOON!

MY NEW FRIEND FROM THE LISBON STREET CLUB! HE HAS A WALLET JUST LIKE MINE!

ALLEY BEHIND LEWISTON LIBRARY! CAMERA ACCIDENTALLY WENT OFF WHILE I WAS PEEING!

I have a few photos of the various apartments in which I lived, including that darling place on Lisbon Street, the one with the cathedral windows and hardwood floors (those holes in the floor were there when I moved in). Here’s me posing with a potted plant that only has three days to live. Here’s me with a friendly neighbor, who would later steal my stereo. Here’s me in the shower. That damn camera just kept going off accidentally.

The point is (Just kidding! There is no point.) that I have this little album with scenes from Lewiston back in the early days. There are maybe two dozen pictures in there from a time when my future was completely uncertain. Looking at those photos is like time travel. It’s spooky in its way. It’s altogether a different experience than looking at your digital photos in Picasa or some other cloud-based storage space.

When you were shooting with film, you knew you only had a few chances to get it right. You arranged your people and your props with great care. You took your time and gave serious thought to things like lighting and ambiance before snapping that photo of your thumb or shower nozzle. Every time you pressed that shutter button thingamajob, you knew you were capturing a moment of history. The act of taking a photo was heavy with importance.

Every old person you know has a photo album just like mine, only bigger and with better looking subjects. The kids’ birthday parties. Christmas through the years. Weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, graduations and, in some morbid families, funerals. When you talk to the owners of those carefully assembled albums, they will tell you frankly, “If my house ever catches fire, the very first thing I will try to retrieve are my pictures. Screw my rotten husband and his stinky dogs; I never liked them, anyway.”

And they mean it utterly. In the age of film cameras, photographs were genuine treasures. Digital photography, on the other hand, dilutes the sentimental value of a picture through sheer volume — you don’t take just one or two snapshots of the precious moment, you take a hundred just because you can. You keep every single copy, too, because space on the Web is pretty near unlimited. You take pictures everywhere you go because you have a camera in your phone, in your music player, in your hairbrush. Pictures everywhere and of everything. In the economy of memories, your photographs become devalued because there are so dang many of them. Ask your dear Aunt Mabeline if she ever took a photo of herself in front of a bathroom mirror. She’ll probably wash your mouth out with soap just for thinking such a thing.

Cameras in this generation are just more things to take for granted. Kids don’t save their money in a piggy bank so they can someday buy a fancy Polaroid, they have cameras on three different gadgets by the time they’re five years old. That photo album you keep in the cabinet (not the one you keep way, way back in your closet) would make that kid laugh hysterically or just yawn himself to sleep.

Not that I’m complaining, mind you, about the way photography has evolved. I have reasons to be grateful that cameras weren’t everywhere back in the mid 1990s. Some history, you know, just shouldn’t be recorded. Now that I’m the mature, responsible and fully-clothed adult you see before you, I appreciate that I can snap 250 shots of a cloud that sort of looks like a fat woman bending over if I want to. I just don’t do so with any kind of gravitas.

Some photography tips to send you on your way:

• If you turn your camera, cellphone or hairbrush at a diagonal before snapping a photo, it’s super creative and you’re, like, a professional or something.

• If you shoot in black and white, it’s super creative and you’re, like, a professional or something.

• When photographing basketball, it is mandatory that your picture contain no less than 14 armpit shots.

• You will never, no matter how hard you search, find my secret Polaroid collection from the early 90s.

BONUS JOKE: What did Mozart do when his Olympus broke? He borrowed Pachelbel’s Canon.

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