I've never been described as a technological guru. In fact, it's safe to assume that if there are more than two moving parts and a battery involved, I am not the man for the job.

However, recent technology is making it possible for even someone like me to be a decent photographer. Not a great one, but one who doesn't cut off the foreheads of my subject or create the always popular "red eye but not from a hangover" look.

Digital cameras are quite the rage and for good reason. Where else can you take something that used to be so difficult and make it easier than cooking minute rice?

All you have to do is point and click. If you don't like the picture, simply delete it as if it never occurred. If only it were this easy in life to wipe out our mistakes!

Going through old photos over the past few weeks, though, there are so many of those photos that would have been deleted, wiping out years of memories in an instant.

My wife's grandmother, for instance, had a camera that still held film from 1990. That's 1990 as in the original George Bush was still president.

You can only imagine the enthusiasm that was created as we rushed to the store to get the film developed, wondering what memories lingered in waiting for 15 years.

Once the film was developed, it was great to try to guess the time frame that the pictures were taken from, and the best we could tell, 1990 was the year. My full head of hair and much trimmer waistline were certainly clues that I had yet to hit the working world.

Fashion trends led us to our answer as well, since my wife could remember the exact location and year she bought certain clothes the same way most of us men can remember baseball statistics or car facts.

Most of the shots were off center, and an occasional thumb skewed the image. Sometimes entire bodies were cut off and many times, the subject was completely caught off guard or blinked in the photo.

But that's what made taking pictures so much fun back then, the uncertainty that they were going to actually turn out OK. Sometimes it was more fun waiting to get the film developed than it was at the actual event where the photos were taken!

Many would disagree with my use of the word "fun" to describe the process, but I don't care. When cameras are the size of credit cards and you can take pictures from your phone, the goal is to be "fun," not "precise" or the next great photographer for "Life" magazine. We are too serious at times, especially when it's inappropriate to be serious.

The memories most of us have in our brains are captured in still frames from a time long ago when Polaroid One Shots were popular. There were no "do-overs" or second chances, which made the process enjoyable. Bad photos were funny.

If you stop and think about it, digital cameras are kind of the next step toward satisfying our insatiable appetite for instant gratification. You don't even need to go the store to get film developed anymore if you have a printer capable of processing your photographs.

I guess the thing that's scary to me is that one day, these digital photos will be old, too. We will laugh at how archaic they are and wonder how we ever survived this time of horrible pictures. Until then, though, I'll continue to not delete any of my photos.