Personalized new born baby gift

Old.

"Our Baby" must be the offspring of humankind. The album craftily compiled for baby Walter Dean Hieby by his mother, Ursula, bears this ubiquitous title, and my own parents also kept one, equally blue for a boy, with the same possessive dedication (albeit in a different language). Embossed with fake gold leaf on the cover, this titular sample of the genre was originally arranged and illustrated by Josephine Bruce and published by C. R. Gibson and Company in New York City. It is one of those variations of painting by numbers where figures are human years and the colors are usually photographs.

On every page there are reserved spaces or data entry fields that track the infant's progress through the first months: starting with "Baby is Born," continuing with signatures of father, mother, doctor and nurse (as if birth was a registered delivery) and a series of firsts; "Baby's First Outing," "The First Photograph," "The First Tooth," "First words," "First steps," "First Time at Table," "First Birthday" and so on. In "Our Baby" mother and the occasional nanny or nurse has meticulously kept Walter on track through the milestone entries, duly noticing, noting and photographing each step on the evolutionary ladder as envisaged by the arrangement furnished for growth. And with every inaugural anniversary, as the life taking shape is keeping pace with the unfolding pages, the pasted photographs uncannily resemble the readymade drawings. Walter is hence not only embraced by his parents through the possessive term of the title, but also a set of physiological standards and normative behaviors extolled by an a dorable cast of illustrated role models.

Walter's first words were "Mama" and "Papa," just like the album predicted in a set of letter blocks decorating that page. But somewhere along this rigid lifeline things started going awry. Photographs and postcards are carelessly piled up and interleaved between the pages. As sloppy supplements to the narrative they escape the destiny of being glued to the outlines; they float around, able to escape entirely or appear in different contexts. Authorial voices also commingle. Notes circumscribe the various subjects that have contributed to Walter's story, yet their relations and roles are reduced to bewildering cursive paths. Toward the end there are numerous blank pages repeatedly asking for "Mother's Notes," but she apparently stopped responding, obstinately gluing photographs over drawings, almost obscuring "Country Days" entirely, and answering the appeal for a pagelong elaboration on "Short Clothes" with a succinct but courteous "Always."

Through mother's incongruous entries there is a sense that Walter's life never fit, just as it did not fill, these pages. The album is strangely anachronistic and the very last page unveils why. Mother jumped ahead to conclude this first volume with an official ending; three newspaper columns on the final spread notify us of Walter's death, at the age of three, underneath a photographic triptych of his last snowfall, two weeks prior. Amidst these parallel echoes of reproduction, no personal note from the mother laments this sudden loss--so startling on the pages of "Our Baby"--but she has gone back through the album, to remember for him, and inscribed the budding life with its death where it first appeared; his last words about donating curls are found under "A Lock of Baby's Hair," his burial smock was worn with "The First Tooth." The record is now complete; the moment has returned. Dedicated as a gift to Walter Dean Hieby from Mamma on the very first page, the eyes of "Our Baby" will never meet their gaze and recollect the embryonic memories of infancy A life traced from the outset according to the entropic norm of firsts does not last, and the enduring record of "Our Baby," that prefabricated sequence where death follows life and survives it, is a single album that speaks volumes.

New.

The latest of Apple Computer, Inc.'s software applications with the highly personalized yet always lowercased "i" prefix is iPhoto. Leaving the first last, in the sense that we had iMovie and consumer-grade editing of moving images long before an equivalent stills freebie, Apple has finally realized another market share that seeks to replace rows of labeled shoeboxes, stacks of 6x4 print envelopes and thematic albums. iPhoto is a digital photographer's raw database, labeled archive, rudimentary image editor, slide-show generator, web-sharing utility, print service center and album-layout tool rolled into one very nifty package. The Internet component is linked to Apple's free but proprietary iTools servers and individual prints, from Kodak, as well as generic albums can be ordered directly through the application. With iPhoto the infamous dictum and easy touch that once revolutionized amateur photography--"you press the button, we do the rest"--has, with a few mouse clicks more, expanded into a veritable shop ping mall of goods and services to manage and augment the precious moments initially captured.

With a digital camera you instantly record and review your shots. Framing, choosing and discarding comprise an extended process habitually linked by sequences of menus or buttons, and that one-hour wait at the drugstore, once considered the fastest way for those dreaded red-eyes to perform their Lazarus act, is now a chronological curiosity, both in terms of speed and obsolescence. In fact, iPhoto fully implements an integrated experience of photography that seamlessly links raw images to data streams and channels them from light to electrons in a practical update on Einstein's equation of matter with energy. When hooked up to the computer, compatible digital cameras will automatically launch the iPhoto application and even import the images without further ado. Once loaded (significantly into a "roll" folder with a film-canister icon) and archived according to one of 14 possible and customizable headings in version 1.0, the host of outlets already mentioned can divert the data to configure it, in a limited fashion, for electronic display or more traditional output. The moment, as the camera's CCD initially conceived it, has remained almost synchronous to its reincarnation throughout the entire process--from LCD screen and CompactFlash card to the internal hard drive and iPhoto's alternate modes of automated realization.

But this data streamlining does not really signal an ontological leap to post-photography in the popular imagination. On the contrary, iPhoto's familiar appeal and copycat slogan of "one-click-ordering" serves as a vernacular revival of the photography we have come to cherish--the photography of the index, the mnemonic device that delivers. Once you have upgraded your computer to Mac OS 10.1.2 or newer to install iPhoto (this will require a couple of updates prior to installation of the OS if you are running 10.1) and purchased an appropriate camera (a list of qualifying models is available from Apple's Web site) you are no longer consumed by the post-photographic void and temporal vacuum caused by aberrant bytes and morphing pixels. iPhoto, like all computer programs, crucially exudes commonality and compatibility. Through the intimate merger of camera and print, image and album, a moment and its record--and the cathartic flow of one to the other through cables and circuit boards--it breeds an umbilical cho rd between subject and object, past and present, that echoes the indexical bind that we recognize: integration reduces separation, digital segmentation is replaced by sequential coherence, and proprietary software thereby makes the digital image chronologically consistent and materially sound, i.e. historical. With every signature iPhoto album (only $29.99 with a limited choice of colors for the cover) comes a reassurance and guarantee that the photograph has traveled down the beaten superhighway to arrive just the way users collectively remember it. Download (y)our future past today.