In the pre-digital days, the days of dark room manipulation and print, the photographer had to rely more on composition and pure subject matter. It was hard to manipulate photos the way we can now with software like Photoshop. But I feel the photographers of old were lucky. They realized the importance of one thing that many of us today have forgotten, the power of print.
Now days, our trillions of images sit on our memory cards. They sit in terabytes of digital storage, hard drives, and internet space. You are lucky to see a picture from a party on Facebook. You will almost never see the same picture in print.
Print has a kind of perseverance that you don't find in digital storage. You are less likely to dig out the old Facebook pics for your family when they come to visit. And good luck showing your grand kids all of those good times that you only stored on Flickr. But whip out a photo album. Listen to the response:
A sigh of dread
Rolling eyes
Protests of "we really should get going"
Open the first page and all complaints stop when they see mom as a little girl, dressed up as Princess Jasmine from Aladin, one of the most popular Disney movies of her youth. She was so cute!
Or dad had long hair and looked a lot more like a rebel in his youth, than the upstanding, and strict father you know now. Is he smoking? No WAY!
And pictures of grandma and grandpa. God, you miss them so much. Something you never really realized until looking at these pictures now.
The looking breaks into laughing, the laughing into reminiscing, the reminiscing into love, and the love is what matters. Get that kind of response with ten people sitting around a laptop, perusing your albums onFacebook.
The great thing is, is basic prints are cheap! Load those images onto a flash drive, tote that flash drive up to Wal-Mart and pop out 50 4x6s for about $10, in less than an hour. That is a great start!. Buy a photo album. I bought one the other day that can hold 300 4x6s for about $10. It is going to be an awesome ride to fill that sucker up.
Just believe me when I say, give printing a shot. Take some of your favorite pictures from that party, some of your mom, some of your dad, some of your kids, alot from your vacation, and print them out. Stick them in a photo album. Fill that book up with as many memories as you can find. When it is full, lose it. Misplace it for about a year. When you find it again after some time, you will already feel the effects when you flip through it. You will want to call your boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, brother, sister, kids, grandkids, everyone to come and look at these pictures you just found.
And it will be awesome.
