He Took a Polaroid Every Day, Until the Day He Died | Hacker News Reader

He Took a Polaroid Every Day, Until the Day He Died

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269 pointsbluesmoon52 comments

This is something that's never far from my mind; the unknown sliver of time we have. I think about it when I wonder if I'm saving enough money for the long term vs spending it on some experience that will enrich my life in the near term. What's the point in saving for retirement if you could be gone in 20, 10, 5 years, or tomorrow? Everyone's idea of a rich and rewarding life is different, yet shares many commonalities: friends, family, work, recreation, and ultimately how those combine to define a rewarding life.

It's tempting to take my camera and do a similar, but different, collection of memories. If nothing else it's a nice web of memories to leave your loved ones and a nice side project that takes little time. Also, supposing you do live beyond 80 or 90 it would be all the more interesting.

www.blipfoto.com is a fantastic community for posting a daily photo. It's the whole idea of the site.

   This is something that's never far from my mind;

How? It's so easy to take things for granted. Do you really wake up and remind yourself that today could be your last?

Not everyday, but certainly in the course of a week I'll think about it. It's a good reminder to focus on what's important and it keeps me from whining about the insignificant daily trials that really amount to life's nuisances.

Interesting link, I created an account and will mess with it some more. I already pay for a flickr account. The site would have to be better for this task for me to really use it to the fullest. I already do some recreational photography with a Rebel EOS T2i, so this would be a side benefit of something I already do anyhow.

I have much to learn from you.

Agreed. That's why the whole FMyLife irritates me so much--there are bigger things than those trivialities to fret over. There are actually a few Steve Jobs' quotes I find greatly inspiring that touch upon that.

""If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." ...I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something."

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

Right?

fml is, really, just a humor site and a place to vent when some perfect storm of events comes over your life. No matter how hard you try to remember the temporary nature of life, most people will still get upset were some of those things to happen, and rightly so.

Like this one: Today, my package from Maxim Electronics came in the mail. My parents thought the package was from Maxim magazine. I am now grounded for months, and they threw away hundreds of dollars of electronics. FML

Show your parents the recept.

Haha, yeah I know what you mean. I just meant the instances where it became so mainstream that people around me were saying such things as "I chipped my nail. FML" which was very irritating.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1112407

I see you are an undergraduate so I presume you're young. I'm neither old nor young, so let me tell you something (I'm not being condescending, I want you to take this to heart) - you won't believe how fast it all goes past. Until you start to see it happening, you don't quite believe it. One day you're 25 and it's all in front of you. Suddenly you're 40 and you hope that you've got long enough left to do everything you wanted to before the credits roll.

The worst part is the acceleration. The older you get, the faster the days fly by.

Yeah, and once you have kids it seems to get even worse... on the plus side, not having to wonder "am I doing anything really meaningful with my life?" any more is a bonus. On the other hand, you're forced to face more mortality; but even this has its advantages (c.f. "meaningful" above).

And it isn't a gradual realization. It comes to you rather suddenly. AND THEN you have kids and it accelerates even faster.

When I'm hanging out with my father-in-law, who is in his mid-60s, often reflects on how his fast life flew. Seemed like he "was only 40 a couple years ago".

Mortality is sobering, ain't it?

Thanks for saying this. I've been overly worried about money here lately. I'm 45 and "should" have died in my mid-thirties (and nearly did). I'm healthy now, as are my sons even though one of them has the same condition I have. You can't really put a price on that.

Peace.

"I think about it when I wonder if I'm saving enough money for the long term vs spending it on some experience that will enrich my life in the near term."

One thing I realized and aim to live by is "Never sacrifice experience over money." I kick myself and always regret the times I withdrew from an incredible experience due to financial reasons. Of course, it is easier said than done, as I am so broke right now but having the most exciting and incredible experience yet. I can't help it.

I say go for the enriching experiences :) You only live once.

This camera (the SX-70) is actually a really neat little pop-up Polaroid camera. The Impossible Project actually re-leased an old Polaroid film factory, bought the equipment before it was scrapped and (I believe) hired a few of the old workers to keep the film in production. Needless to say, it is very, very cool. You can pick up an SX-70 for about $100 on eBay and a three pack of film for $50ish.

http://www.the-impossible-project.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaroid_SX-70

A surprisingly worthwhile & technical ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jaiq_ZZ_eM

That video is terrific.

My dad had an SX-70 that he used for work. I used to "play" with it all of the time when I was a kid, expanding it then folding it up again and again. I never did see the thing ever take an actual picture, though. I guess the film was kind of expensive.

FYI: The TIP films still needs work before it's the same quality and condition as the production film. Initially the colors retain but after a day or two they all fade out.

The ad, or mini-documentary, is by the great designers Charles and Ray Eames.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_and_Ray_Eames

It's so beautiful.

Those polaroids aren't just moments frozen in time, but memories immortalized. I know this sounds quite corny, but in a way this is a crude summation of the things he truly left behind. It has everything his moments of happiness, sadness, people that made his life worth living, his work. Everything.

Beautiful.

[edit: This is something so obvious, but it takes time to sink in. Is this what life is? When you see his choices, the women he fell in love with. How he married that someone a few weeks before his death. It just puts everything into sharp perspective. Is this life?

Wow.]

To me, I think the most powerful thing in the whole post is at the very end it says

   Update 4: Jamie Livingston has been added to Wikipedia.

Man takes pictures daily to express his creativity. Those close to him work hard to make it public. A single blogger happens to find out about it and recounts the creativity. The greater social web learns about the life of Jamie Livingston and, in turn, the small expression of his creativity will be felt forever. At least it will be known to whoever wants to search. Forever.

This is an excellent argument against the deletionist faction on Wikipedia. Would this be considered notable?

The fact that the article could be deleted didn't even occur to me. If every human being did this, it wouldn't be notable but how is it not notable? Why is there even a "deletionist faction" on Wikipedia? Not storage costs...

I agree, I find the whole idea of deleting non-notable articles from wikipedia as idiotic. The whole process of determining non-notable things is a joke. They could at least deprecate the articles to a sub wiki, like a universe (compared to main on ubuntu). Deleting is just dumb.

The argument is that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a kitchen sink. (I don't agree with deletionists.)

Yeh; it passes various notability grounds.

This is beautiful not only because it reminds me to stop working. It's sunday and life shouldn't only be work. Bye HN.

For those saying "this makes me want to appreciate life more. or want to splurge now at the possible potential of death, soon." - I say to you, be rational.

These kinds of articles are examples of the availability heuristic - "in which people predict the frequency of an event, or a proportion within a population, based on how easily an example can be brought to mind."

Although every little emotional piece of content relative to death makes us think a little harder about our own mortality, it is still in our best interests to plan for the future. This article does not decrease our life expectancy.

If you want to somehow balance extremes, look at your average life expectancy based on things like living conditions and genetics, cut it down five years, then appropriately plan your financial and life goals around that new, tempered (and likely preemptive) end date.

Your friend dies in a car crash today. Your mother is diagnosed with cancer tomorrow. Fortunately, life is no less fragile than it was yesterday, and with all certainty, it is actually less so with continued medicinal developments and ongoing life-extending research.

Yes, this is powerful. Yes, it shoulld make you appreciate life a little more. No, it should not offer justification for a life of poverty and shortsightedness.

Long-term projects are so rare. It takes real insight to carry out a project like this before digital cameras came around and made taking pictures too cheap to measure.

I recently got a laptop with a built-in webcamera. Once I got it working with Ubuntu, I thought, why not have the webcam take a picture every day or so? Ultimately I set it, via cron, to take a picture and a screenshot every hour that the lid is open, like so:

     @hourly if grep open /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID0/state; then import -quality 80 -window root png:$HOME/photos/webcam/xwd-`date \+\%\s`.png && optipng -o9 -fix `ls -t ~/photos/webcam/*.png|head -1`; fi

     @hourly if grep open /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID0/state; then fswebcam --resolution 1280x1024 -S 2 -F 3 ~/photos/webcam/`date \+\%\s`.jpg && jpegoptim -m80 `ls -t ~/photos/webcam/*.jpg|head -1`; fi

(Check for lid being open, use imagemagick/fswebcam to grab an image, output a date-stamped file, and then optimize it - saves space like 40% for the screenshots, not so much for the webcam. It doesn't matter so much when a few weeks has yielded about 60MB, but it will help in the long run.)

Another long-term project I'm trying is recording predictions and my confidence in them: http://predictionbook.com/users/gwern

Presumably this will teach me exactly how foolish I was when I was younger, and what strange beliefs I held about the future. world

cool stuff!! i am paying tribute to your idea the cron job for webcams in the best way possible - by imitating it. Also predictionbook seems nice as do your predictions.

I've been going 10 years so far at something similar, and while I've taken a lot more than one photo a day on average, I'm still working on a mechanism to extract the interesting ones from the documentary chaff. I am trying to attack the problem by using extensive metadata to organize along different dimensions, but the resulting explanatory notes sort of ruin the magic of the mystery:

http://james.lab6.com/photos/

If you found these photos fascinating, you may find Vivian Maier's photos interesting. A street photographer from the 1950s to 1990s. Discovered at an auction. Tens of thousands of undeveloped rolls.

Memento mori

http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com/

Ah, very inspiring, and reminds me of the quote by John Waters: "Without obsession, life is nothing."

Pretty amazing guy. I wanted to question how big of a ny mets fan he was living in the 80s. So I went to October 27, 1986 - and yep there he was. What a great shot of the celebration at Shea Stadium.

Dead at 41, makes me think about life.

Actually inspires me to start something similar

For those inspired to try something like this, posterous is a pretty good tool simply because it's so simple to email a photo to it after taking it with an iPhone or similar device.

It reminds me of similar trends of people who photograph what they eat:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/dining/07camera.html

or that they photograph themselves every day, then post time-lapsed videos on YouTube.

I realize this misses the emotional point of these series - this was a more artistic undertaking, but still...

Also, to those suggesting this is a good idea.. it's already happening. Nowadays people's life albums are being shared on Facebook and other social websites... there was a great post about how we will feel more keenly our own mortality when our online "friends" start to die.

(see: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1932803,00.... )

What a great Sunday morning post. Thank's bluesmoon.

Awesome article, I updated the photo-a-day entry with this work at http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/photo-a-day

DOLLY! WILL YOU GET A POLAROID OF THAT?

Very inspiring. coincidentally we are building something that lets anyone create, store and share your life in pictures and features to keep you motivated. its at piclyf.com and gonna launch this month.

imo its not in very good taste to promote your product on this thread.

Unless the spot is very subtle, in context and well executed.

(Which his was not)

haha, yeah well lesson learned. :)

Two words for him, rest for your spam? Stay classy.

He died poor after having spent more than 300k in expensive Polaroid films.

At least he managed to inspire >300k people.

Oops, made the joke before actually seeing the site. After reading it I understand the downvotes...

18 years of photographs, around 6570. Currently, 16 exposures for the SX-70 (the camera he used) cost $72 on ebay. That puts the cost of 6570 polaroid pictures today at a bit less than $30,000 - and they would have been cheaper 13 years ago, when he died. There's also no evidence from the pictures shown in the article that he died poor.

And the price right now is so high because Polaroid stopped making the film a couple of years ago. Before that, film was a little over $1/picture.

Right, he was not a cheap bastard, was he?

I would say money well spent.

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