My 17-year-old daughter has been around a fair bit this summer. We have been doing college visits, vacationing and generally hanging out.

My wife, Tami, arranged to have Kaitlin's "senior picture" taken. In a culture bereft of ritual it seems the "senior picture" has gone from being "no big deal" in my day, to a veritable rite of passage a mere 29 years later.

I shot my senior picture myself and developed it in the darkroom of the high school newspaper. Back then printing photographs was a deeply wasteful process, filled with toxins, persistent chemicals, metals of all sorts and stuff that typically went down the drain.

We had safe lights and chemically treated paper to print on, and if we missed the recipe on the "fixer," the photos would slowly vanish after seeing the light of day. Whole rolls of film would be routinely ruined by accidental exposure to light, and I remember printing vast numbers of sports photographs, only to pick one for the paper, and to throw the rest away.

It was a vastly energy-intensive undertaking.

For Kaitlin's senior picture we hired Jessica Benton, who has recently hung out her shingle as a professional photographer in Pittsboro.

Jessica is the one who does annual photographs of revelers at the Mardi Gras Ball, among other things, and the notion that she would start her own business in the depths of our current economic downturn is an inspiration to all of us.

It was raining the day she arrived to do the photo shoot, so we chatted a bit as she organized lights and props and bags of photographic stuff.

We talked about how photography has changed. I speculated that today's digital photographs demand a fraction of the resources needed 30 years ago. Surely our equipment and computers are derived from persistent materials that contain huge amounts of embodied energy, but when we take a bunch of photos we dislike, we now simply hit "delete."

On one of our college visits the tour guide bragged about the "24 hours access to the darkroom," which I thought was strange. I asked Jessica, "Does anyone even use darkrooms anymore?"

As she changed her lens and speculated on the ambient light she remarked that dark rooms were still useful for some "art photography."

It struck me that if photography has changed, such that producing good pictures demand say, 75 percent less energy than they once did, perhaps photography could become the poster child for the energy conservation we now need across the board.

That is, in every field of endeavor.

That is, fast.

Today we nibble around the edges of our conservation resource, despite the fact that it is far and away the simplest path to achieve sustainable human habitation of the planet. We are surprised when the Obama administration's "Cash for Clunkers Program," which offers free money to folks who upgrade their gas-guzzlers to more fuel-efficient models, gobbles up a billion dollars in its first week of existence.

The North Carolina legislature recently renewed its tax credits for renewable energy systems, now including geothermal, and the N.C. Green Business Fund just punched a million dollars worth of stimulus money into a handful of projects around the state.

Our State Energy Office has gone from the brink of collapse to a well-heeled part of state government. It appears they might be moving from the non-descript flex space they once shared with the N.C. Boxing Commission to some downtown Raleigh digs as part of the Department of Commerce.

All of which is good news. Yet each is a mere scribble in the margin of the endeavor that lies before us.

We can't stimulate our way to prosperity. We can't give away money fast enough. And we can't hope that folks with high tax liabilities will avail themselves of some of the most attractive tax credits in the land.

What we need to do is follow the lead of digital photography. We need a complete transformation of how we consume, and interact with energy, just as the photography of my high school days is virtually unrecognizable today.

Kaitlin's senior pictures came out great. Jessica put them on a private Internet site for grandparents and relatives to view, and to purchase if they so desire. No prints except those wanted for the wallet, the wall or the Web. No chemicals for the drain.

Just a wonderful experience, and some pictures to remind us of this time in Kaitlin's life.