When I was a kid, so starting back in the mid 1960s, people would take a reasonable number of photos that special events are on vacation, but remember they were on film. That meant you had to pay for the film, and then you had to pay to get the film developed. You were lucky to get maybe 24 pictures of Christmas each year.

They also could turn out terrible since you didn’t see until they got developed and they were all sorts of ways to go wrong. You could have all the same framing error errors that you do today where somebody just points the camera poorly but you wouldn’t know about it until you got the film developed. You didn’t have the same type of dynamic range, auto focus, auto exposure correction, color, correction, and all that stuff going on.

If you wanted a good photo, you had to wait for uncle Jim to set up his tripods or, go see a professional. Not everybody had an uncle Jim, but everybody could go to Sears or JCPenney’s. It would be quite common to do this every year for some middle-class families, maybe less for people with less money, and for some families, they just never did it at all. It’s not a universal thing.

The other way you tended to get good photos, especially of your kid was, school photos. They would take photos so you could have one in your yearbook and they would sell you a package of prints so that your family could put a big one up in the living room that was current, and send smaller copies to the grandparents and aunt Gladys, maybe even want uncle Jim to show him what a good photo background really looks like. Not everybody wants palm trees, uncle Jim.

Over the past decade, I’ve seen places crop up that are effectively a photo studio — with better lighting and backdrops and some props — but they charge you a flat fee and let you take pictures as many as you want with your phone. It’s a pretty clever idea, and probably a good filler for otherwise empty storefront.