The other day, I was watching an online web conferencing class about the history of photography… Remember when pictures were actual physical objects held in your hand, and not just images on a computer screen? Whether you used a disposable camera, an expensive professional camera, or a regular snapshot camera, you ended up with an envelope of printed photos. Now, with digital cameras, we often never even print out our photos, and if we do, we don’t take much care in preserving them.
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.
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.
While this allows us to share the photos immediately with people who are not in the same physical location, it takes away the experience of sitting on the couch and passing around a photo album. Crowding around a computer screen is more difficult and much less conducive to relaxed conversation.
There are definitely ways that we can combine the advantages of digital photography with the good aspects of print photography. You can have your digital photos printed; you just have to use one of the machines that they have in drugstores with photo developing service. These machines allow you to crop, adjust and print digital photos. If you buy a few scrapbooking tools, you can create a beautiful print album from your digital photos.
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