UNITED STATES—Cataloguing our lives is something we’ve always done! Portraits, then photographs, now digital photography – it’s even easier with the rise of smartphones and social media. These are great platforms on which to post our new snaps, and we can easily share them with the world, by posting to places such as Instagram and Facebook. Not a single scenic view or great moment is left unrecorded, and people even witness their rise to fame and stardom through these same media. This is, of course, fantastic and it is estimated that a staggering 1.8 billion photos uploaded to the internet every day! That is an awful lot of selfies, and cat pictures! All the moments we could ever hope for are being preserved but the only thing this lacks is that familiar feel that photographs give us. A physical record of what you’ve seen, to pass around, to mull over – we’re looking for the best way to find something to photograph, and not the best place to print photos after we’ve got the shot! Whether you get it enlarged, printed onto photo paper, printed onto a canvas, or even engraved- there are loads of options for you, depending on your needs!
Having hundreds and even thousands of photos saved digitally is great, and we’re sharing them between each other via the internet more than ever, but there’s nothing that beats the ability to leaf through a photo album. Photos stuck on pin boards, a photograph of your sweetheart in your locket, even the photo montage of a family member’s formative years (to be brought out at every family gathering, for the entertainment of all and embarrassment of the subject) are all things which aren’t quite the same, or even as possible to do when all of our memories are only stored on digital platforms. For this reason, it’s always worth looking into getting photographs printed out and stored, to give them back that something special.
Having a whole collection of photographs in your house and in albums brings us back to the way we always used to look at photos. Just because photographs are shared now, it doesn’t mean that it has to take away from what we could be doing by decorating our homes with them, and gathering together to pore over them. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then surely having them in an album ready to look at whenever and wherever you want, is worth countless.
The answer is to revert back taking photographs to enjoy physically. We should print them off, display them in our homes, hang them on the walls and have a constant reminder of family, friends, and loved ones! A digital album is absolutely no substitute for the real thing and I firmly believe we need to get back on track with taking images to last, not just to store!
