So I loaded up my personal favorite. “Ella Gets Plastered” is a two-minute clip from a long-ago birthday party where the guests made facemasks so ugly that even Freddy Krueger wouldn’t wear them.
It has some great moments, especially the part where the plaster dries faster than anyone expected and gives some guests accidental eyebrow waxes. It also happens to be the only surviving family video that we have.
Once there were others, of course. As far back as 1989, I got a terrible backache from carrying around the pack of unwieldy, heavy equipment necessary to make a riveting 10-minute thriller called “Baby Zoe Takes a Bath.” But we don’t own a VCR anymore to play it.
In 1992, I bought an expensive camcorder to shoot “Frosting Face” to document Ella’s first birthday. That tape broke. And in 1998, my husband made a desktop video clip called “The Walker” on the day Clementine took her first steps. Then the hard drive died.
Years went by without pictures. It became too hard to be the family archivist in an age of ever-changing technology, especially for someone like me who fears any gadget more complicated than a cocktail shaker. Every time I tried, a battery died or a memory card went missing or I pushed the wrong button or accidentally taped over someone’s piano recital.
“So this is all you have to show for nearly two decades of raising children?” asked my oldest daughter, Zoe, pointing accusingly at the final wrenching face-peel scene in “Ella Gets Plastered.”
She got good at guilt at college. So last week I decided to try to redeem myself — and strike a blow for long-suffering, technically challenged family archivists everywhere — by testing the tiny, new Flip Video Mino camera ($179), whose greatest virtue is that with no buttons to push, its bare-bones touch screen barely does anything (beyond a little light zooming).
“That’s what makes it fun,” said Jonathan Kaplan, the chief executive of Pure Digital Technologies, the company that makes the Mino.
Fun? I suppose Mr. Kaplan should know, having already sold nearly a million units of an earlier, bulkier generation of Flip Video camcorders released last year. He added that another big selling point is that you can easily upload the videos to the Internet — a medium one hopes won’t become obsolete as quickly as, say, Betamax — to store them at sites like YouTube or, in my case, Facebook.
Still, I was skeptical. My guess is that amateurs have been feeling guilty about the pictures they missed ever since the mid-1800s, when the Englishman who was an inventor of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot, put his own family in front of a camera and yelled “cheese.”
On the other hand, my offspring would probably enjoy the process more than Mr. Talbot’s did, the historian Douglas R. Nickel said when I phoned him to describe the pressure I was under to make videos. “In the 19th century, they had to pose for uncomfortably long periods of time. In bright sunshine. Outside,” said Dr. Nickel, the Andrea V. Rosenthal Professor of Modern Art at Brown University. “You had to hold that pose. It was torturous.”
I had to admit that the shiny black Mino review unit Mr. Kaplan lent to me last week didn’t look like it would torture anyone. It was adorable, in fact. Smaller and thinner than some decks of cards I’ve owned, it had no buttons, no memory card (it has 2 gigabytes of built-in memory) and required no AA batteries (it automatically recharged when plugged into a computer).
After I took it out of its case, it took about 10 seconds to figure out where to press the touch screen to start making memories.
“Today, we’re going to watch someone we all know play online poker,” I said into the microphone as I aimed the Mino toward my husband and zoomed in on his computer screen. “Honey, can you tell the camera how much you’ve won?”
“Turn that thing off,” my husband snapped.
“Be glad you don’t have to hold the pose in bright sunshine for several minutes,” I pleaded. “Help me make memories.”
“Here’s a memory,” he said, forcing me to yell “cut” before he could strike a pose that would have shocked the Talbots.
Next, I plugged the Mino directly into the back of my Mac (no ugly cords, just a metal coupler thing). While I installed the simple editing software, my 10-year-old daughter, Clementine, came into the room.
As we watched the 20-second episode of “The Poker Player’s Revenge,” I felt a terrible wave of nostalgia, as sadness and longing for a lost time overcame me.
“I miss those days,” I said.
“It happened five minutes ago,” Clementine said.
“Look how young your father looks,” I said.
Clementine picked up the Mino, examined it briefly and said, “That’s because you forgot to peel the plastic off the lens.”
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