Print Photography And Digital Photography

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.

Before the digital age, getting your photos developed was like receiving a surprise gift. After a trip with friends or family, you would take your five or six rolls of film to the drugstore. You would often be too excited to wait overnight, so you would choose the one-hour photo service, and check your black sport watch repeatedly, waiting until the hour had passed.

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.

Digital cameras show us the photo immediately after it is taken, so we lose the element of surprise. Often times, if we are not satisfied with a shot, we erase it and take a new one. This may give us greater control over the finished product, but it means that we lose the fun of discovering that photo we forgot was ever taken.

Along with the surprise has gone the necessity of organizing photos into physical albums. Now, we just upload the pictures to a hard drive or a social networking site and put them in ‘albums’ there.

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.