These days, with all of the digital media out there, people often neglect to preserve actual photographs, and in many cases never even have photographs printed. Before digital cameras, physical prints of pictures were one of the only tangible ways to preserve your memories. Whether you had a fancy camera or a simple snapshot camera, or even if you just used a disposable, you still ended up with pictures in hand.
Since you couldn’t see the pictures you took with the older cameras, you often forgot what you had taken photos of by the time the roll was finished. You might go on a family trip and take four or five rolls of photos, not getting them developed until you got home and went to the drugstore. If you were especially anxious, you would pay extra to have them developed in one hour. You would hang around close by, checking your black sport watch repeatedly until it was finally time to pick up the pictures.
The fun of looking through the photos was a great way to top off the vacation itself. You might find a shot of a gorgeous sunset above a lake, or a funny candid photo of your brother showing off the men’s sport watch he bought on impulse at a rest stop. Looking through the photos, and filing them in an album, you live the memories once again.
These days, digital cameras display the photos immediately after they are taken. When you aren’t satisfied with a photo, you simply erase it and take another one. While in some ways, this enhances our artistic control, it robs us of the element of surprise. We look through our photos several times each day, instead of waiting until the end of a trip to come across ones that we forgot we had taken.
Not only have we lost the surprise, but we have also lost the necessity of physical photo albums. More often than not, we simply take the digital camera, hook it up to our computer, and transfer the photos onto a CD, onto our hard drive, or onto a social networking site.
The advantage of digital photos is that they take up less space, and they are easier to share with people in other places. But you cannot have the same social experience around a computer screen as you can have sitting on a couch and passing around an album or a stack of photographs.
With a little effort, you can enjoy the convenience of the digital photography age without losing all the pleasures of looking at and sharing print photos. Most drug stores have machines where you can order prints of your digital photos. You can crop them and play with the color schemes, or just print them as they are. Buy some photo albums and some scrapbooking tools, and get started. You can use the versatility of digital photography to enhance the art of preserving your memories.
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