Misty water-coloured memories in digital

Net Results: Once or twice a year when I was a kid, we would have one of the evenings I loved best - home movies, writes Karlin Lillington.

My father would go to the camera store to rent a little film projector and one of those easel screens that pull down like a schoolroom map of the world. Then out would come a shoebox full of 8 mm films.

We all waited in anticipation as each got wound onto the little projector reel, the lights went off and some previous episode in our family life unspooled, flickering, onto the white rectangle of the screen. That birthday party when I turned five, with a manic round of musical chairs; the day we brought our Great Pyrenees puppy home; the grown dog pulling a cart full of laughing kids around the block. And our absolute favourite, the trip to the San Francisco Zoo when Dad happened to catch the hippopotamus taking a wee.

We all knew this was the point at which Dad would reverse the projector and make the stream go back in, then forward it and make it go back out. Pretty silly stuff, and of little interest to anyone outside of family, but we sure loved it.

This all came to mind this past weekend when I travelled to Wisconsin for a family reunion with my mother's side of the family.

Actually, my mother's side of the family is the same as my father's side of the family and has been since 1968 when my mom's mom married my dad's dad (each having lost their other spouse).

I know, it makes your head hurt to try and figure it out, but basically it means my parents are now step-brother and step-sister, while I'm my own cousin, and step-sister to myself. I think.

Some 70 of us gathered at a cousin's lovely home on a small lake on 17 acres, where we rowed, fished, swam, ate, drank, and lit firecrackers and fireworks in the company of several dogs and cats, a ferret, and a pygmy goat named Rachel.

We all had a proliferation of cameras - nearly all of them digital - and camcorders. On the last day of our gathering, my techie cousin Tim rounded up all the cameras, downloaded all the pictures to his laptop, and burned a CD with some 300-plus images taken by all of us, for everyone who attended.

Next, he'll edit all the digital camcorder images and burn a DVD for everyone. The still images will also start popping up on family websites and our family email group site on Yahoo.com.

What a change from the days of the boxy Kodak "Brownie" black-and-white camera and the 8 mm film camera that was rented for such special occasions, the two technological recorders of family life in my childhood.

In contrast to the long wait for films to be developed, and in the case of the moving pictures, the only very occasional viewing of the events recorded, today's digital devices bring instant gratification. Tim had his daily pictures running as a permanent slideshow on his laptop all weekend, so anyone who wandered into the house could stop and watch.

I can highly recommend setting up an email mailing group for your family or friends as well, if you haven't tried this. Several sites allow you to do this - on Yahoo, simply visit http://groups.yahoo. com for more information.

There, you can set up a closed group for a limited membership (which is how our family group operates), but there are many open groups which you can register to join. We use our group to post occasional photos, tease each other, and add family news. Our group was especially useful recently, when it enabled us all keep in regular contact after our 96-year-old family matriarch, my grandmother, had a fall and surgery, then a recuperation in hospital before returning to live (alone!) in her own house. Our reunion was intended to celebrate her 96 years of feistiness.

Of course, there are downsides to digital. Gone is the excitement of the very special, rare moments when we'd screen the family films.

And digital stuff seems to break more frequently than analogue devices. My digital camera gave up the ghost on this trip, at less than two years old. In contrast, my Pentax, bought in 1984, has never been serviced in 20 years and works flawlessly.

I also wonder about how we'll view these memories in the future, with digital storage formats quickly replacing one another. On the other hand, we never watch the old 8 mm films any more, and I was shocked at how some colour pictures in my grandma's photo albums had already faded badly.

The black-and-white family pictures taken in the 1800s and early 1900s all are pristine, however - a humbling reminder that new may not always mean better.