photo tips for regular people : print your photos
We enjoy doing workshops and educational talks about photography. We’re looking forward to hosting a class from the DW Poppy high school arts program on Tuesday to chat about our career path. When we were in high school Jason aspired to be an architect and I aspired to be a psychologist. 10 years ago we had just bought our first SLR camera out of the buy and sell and were trying to figure out how to load the film correctly. It took 3 tries to get the film roll loaded properly so we could expose it. It took several more tries to figure out that we were supposed to turn the dials until the needle thingy was in the middle.
Anyways … I’ve been thinking it might be of interest for us to post some of the practical tips and ideas we mention in our presentations on our blog. Here goes tip #1.
Print your pictures every month.
With the age of digital photography most of us take tons of pictures and print very few. This creates a couple potential problems.
When your hard drive with all your photos on it bites the dust you will moan and gnash your teeth as you think of all the memories that it has taken with it. Please note it is not *IF* your hard drive fails, it is *WHEN.* If you have your photos backed up on disks and you have physical prints there will be less moaning and gnashing of teeth.
Another potential problem is the rate at which technology is changing. Can you imagine trying to pull all your photos off of a floppy disk? That was 15 years ago. 15 years from now having files on CD or DVD may present a similar problem. If you have a box of printed photos you will still be able to look through them and warmly chuckle at your 2008 hairstyle and clothing.
If you have questions that have to do with photography feel free to post them in the comments and we’ll answer them for you in a future post. If you are looking for someone to speak to a group about photography feel free to contact us. We bring pictures and have never had anyone fall asleep (other than newborns) in one of our talks which we take as a good sign.
Nov 23, 2008 @ 11:22:10
Ah true words of wisdom. Now if only I would follow that for my own personal photos.
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Nov 23, 2008 @ 15:52:58
This is excellent advise. Since I’m not a great scrap booker, I plan to make a photo book on Shutterfly.com or a similar website. Also, I bought an external hard drive to back up my photos before our baby was born and now 2.5 months and 345 pictures (of the baby) later, I still haven’t made a backup. I think I’ll do that now…
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Nov 26, 2008 @ 18:11:09
All I have to say is back up those memories now! Our computer crashed last year and we lost too many pictures and video clips. It can be the most heart wrenching thought knowing your pictures may be gone forever and I actually cried. Luckily we have a magical computer tech and he was able to retrieve about 80-90% of the pictures, unfortunatley we did lose all the video clips. So great advice about printing and backing up pictures! I am hoping I have been a good enough girl this year and Santa will bring me an external hard drive.
)
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Feb 22, 2009 @ 06:13:43
Great advice. Thanks. You can also put your pictures and clips on Flickr.com to keep them safe…..just in case.
But printing the nicest pictures and putting them in an album, or make a few digital albums of your favorites every so often is the best idea. And it will keep your friends alert…..when you want to show them ALL your digital photo’s, they might end up falling asleep ….O, yes, one more idea: delete all the bad pictures, as soon as possible, and make a few maps of your favorites.
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