The Lost Art of Printed Photographs
One of my favourite things to do is to look through old photographs. My parents were good with taking pictures of us kids and my mom was even organized enough to write the date and location on the back of the pictures, before putting them into albums. I adopted the habit for the most part, but also have a bin full of loose pictures, some with key information on the back, and some without. The great thing about pictures is it jogs your memory. It can bring you back to a time that you think you will never forget, and over time, you eventually do. That is, until you see a photograph and it all comes back. Pictures are like a history book, they show the signs of the times- the hairstyles, fashion, vehicles…the proof is in the pictures. Side note that I will save for another blog post but GET IN the darn pictures!
A good friend recently celebrated a milestone birthday and I had to go through my pictures to add to a group birthday video. It was nostalgic looking back through our 40 plus years of friendship, but what I noticed was that my pictures stopped around 2006. Now there are a few reasons for this (I moved away, had my first son), but the biggest reason for this was the advancement of digital photography.
First it was digital cameras and memory cards, and then good quality cameras in phones. I still have a digital camera that I use once in awhile for better quality intentional pictures. And of course, I am rarely without my cell phone, so I am always ready to catch a photo. But with this convenience comes a price. Long before the instant gratification of digital photography, where you can quickly look at a screen to see if your picture “worked”, you used to have to wait for your film to be developed, at a store, and cross your fingers you got a few good shots (I may have just aged myself). But in retrospect, the beauty of that was you got hard copies of your pictures. I will admit I am not the most organized person, but when I look on my phone now I have over 8 000 pictures, I have some floating around somewhere in iCloud (no idea how to access them), over 1000 on the PC I am currently typing on (not backed up anywhere) and another million (ok, exaggerating a bit) on a hard drive. Yes, a lot could be deleted, and I will at some point organize them on an external drive. But looking at pictures on a screen is just not the same. To get digital pictures to hard copies takes more effort on your part, I get it. Kids of this generation are so used to screens that they do not know any different. But for this old girl, I still prefer to hold memories in my hands.