I'm amazed at the shear number of digital pictures that must exist in our highly technical society.  And more than that, I'm amazed at the variety of objects, people, and places that are photographed on a more-than-regular basis. 

It used to be that pictures were largely reserved for special occasions.  Parents (since most families only owned one camera, if that) would photograph their kids at Christmas, birthdays, and vacations, leaving their photo albums largely untouched for months at a time.  Unless your parent was an artist, it's hard to see a real fluid progression of your childhood in photo albums.  There were a few pictures from that day at the beach when you were 7.  And then there's your 8th birthday.  And BAM, you're in high school. 

These days, people take pictures of everything, all the time.  And everybody has a camera.  A typical week-long vacation for a habitual picture-taker like me usually brings in around 400 pictures.  A typical hike in the woods or stroll around a park can yield around 20.  I've found that the older I get (or the longer I've had a camera), the more pictures I'll take.  On a cruise in the Caribbean in May of 2006, I took about 85 pictures.  On a cruise in Hawaii in March of 2007, I took about 400.  I gradually become less and less selective about what I consider to be picture-worthy. 

But again, besides the actual number of pictures, it's amazing what gets photographed.  I take some pretty stupid pictures.  Whether it's a bug on a shirt, a sign on a building, or an unusual food item, anything and everything gets photographed.  And that's just me.  I see what other people take pictures of.  Everybody with a digital camera takes stupid pictures, simply for the fact that "if I don't like it, I'll delete it later."  It's a great thing to be able to take hundreds of pictures without even the slightest thought about film or cost or anything like that.  But I wonder if the world is literally increasing in weight as more and more magnetic hard drives are filled to capacity with digital pictures.