Before digital cameras become common, physical prints of pictures were the way that people preserved their memories. Whether you had a huge camera with many different flash settings and lens adjustments, a simple camera for taking snapshots, or even if you used disposable cameras, you got developed printed pictures. Now, with all of the digital media options we have, we take much less care in preserving photos, if we even print them at all.
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.
Looking at the photos was always a great end to a vacation. You could relive the beautiful hike you took in the mountains, or laugh at the shot of your brother showing off the men’s sport watch he paid way too much for at a gift shop. Looking through the photos and placing them in an album was all part of the experience.
Now, with digital cameras, we see a photo seconds after we have taken it. If we are not one-hundred percent satisfied with it, we can erase it and take it again. This gives us greater artistic control over the photos we end up with, but it takes away the element of surprise. No longer after a trip do we have the pleasure of coming across a photo we had forgotten was ever 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.
There are advantages to this, in that we can easily share photos with people who are not in the same place as we are. But we lose the fun of passing a photo album around the room and looking at the photos together. This is much harder to do around a computer screen.
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.
