A camera in the hand of a kid

Slightly off topic topday. Here is a holiday gift idea for small children: a very cheap, simple digital camera with a huge memory card. The key is that the buttons are easy to use. The camera app on a discarded iPhone or iPod is still to fiddly for a small child to use.

The result is an amazing stream of pictures of the life of a child through her own eyes. Camera positions are low and subjects are interesting. Art work that she created. A castel that was built. Daddy checking email on his phone again and not paying attention to you. A nanny preparing the bath water. Mammy fixing car seats.



If you upload the camera images together with the ones you are taking, you get an amazing recording of family life organized with time stamps. Lower the resolution and the file size on the camera so she does not fill 4GB in 2 days though.

It is interesting to see that preserving visual memories does not really require pin sharp images with millions of pixels, it just needs someone to be there at the right moment, snapping the right image. Adults usually lose the moment. Your kid photographer will not.