Months ago I showed my father how to take screen shots on his iPad and iMac, and he routinely takes them while using FaceTime video conferencing with my 1 year-old daughter. Due to poor bandwidth at home (we live in San Francisco and are subject to the tender mercies of AT&T’s not-even-third-world-grade DSL), the image quality can be described as blurry VGA at best. Yet he is happy with the results, and even made a photo book featuring many of these screenshots, showing the wide range of fleeting expressions she displays. When printed at passport photo size, the fuzziness is surprisingly passable. He has also gotten my technophobe mother in the game.

I spend a lot of time obsessing over the finer points of camera and lens technology, and how to wring the best technical quality out of my photos, but my parents show how content trumps presentation.