A scary realization hit me a few weeks back when a relative asked if I had a photo of myself that they could have to add to a family album that was being prepared as part of a birthday present for my Granddad. After around ten minutes of looking I realized that I actually had no recent physical pictures of myself whatsoever because any that were taken of me in the last couple of years were taken using a digital camera and then either immediately deleted or stored on the PC.
Of course if I went back to pre-digital days I found that I had hundreds of pictures of me as a teenager stashed away in shoeboxes and in albums. These pictures were all taken using an old 35mm camera and to be fair half of them were rubbish so would probably have been deleted to save memory if digital technology had been around at the time. Half the fun of taking photos back then was the number of poor quality but funny pictures that always resulted from poor photography skills or simply when you wanted to use up the end of a film.
It´s this our current attitude that worries me; if we delete all photos that aren´t perfect and then don´t bother printing the ones that we do decide to keep but instead choose to keep them on our PC´s then what are we going to have in the future to remind of years gone by? Of course many people choose instead to save their entire photo albums on their computers hard drive but chances are that sooner or later that hard disk is going to crash or that something untoward will happen to that data and then you´ll be left with nothing.
Of course it doesn´t have to be this way; digital photography is great and it is ultimately our attitude that needs changing. There are plenty of options for ensuring that you manage to preserve your precious memories on film:
- Invest in a good quality, cheap to run printer that preferably has a memory slot built in for your cameras memory card. The memory card slot will avoid you having to mess around with having to print pictures from your PC and instead just insert your memory card and choose to print off all pictures - Don´t be too discriminate in which ones you print.
- If you don´t have a good printer or can´t be bothered with the hassle of printing them yourself then take your cameras memory card to a regular film processing company who should be happy to print them out for you professionally just like it used to be when you took your old films to be processed.
- If you´re even too lazy to head to your local store for them to print out your photos then use a company such as Pixmania - simply upload your photos to them and they´ll then print out your pictures and post them to you.
- Don´t delete any picture that isn´t perfect. Some of my most treasured pictures from the past were ones at the time I thought were rubbish at the time but they now remind of specific moments in my life.
- If you do keep the majority of your photos on your computer then please do make sure that you keep a backup on CD, DVD or by uploading them to one of the many picture storage sites on the Internet.
- If you´re not going to do digital photography properly by using a good quality camera and creating good quality printouts then do yourself a favour for the time being and stick to 35mm film.
All the above is fairly obvious stuff but I thought it should be mentioned before we all find ourselves years down the line with nothing but faded memories to show for the journey thanks to our half hearted switch to digital technology.
Computer Articles 2007
