Why I cherish prints over digital
We live in a digital age. Everything is so accessible - you've got a camera right at your fingertips now, that little computer right in your hand. So handy. Just take it out, click add your images to social media and there you go. So easy this digital age.
11 years ago I purchased my first DSLR camera - I had a film SLR camera for years and when digital was becoming all the rage with photography I decided to upgrade. Even though I told myself I wouldn't. Digital has been amazing I can admit that! The quality has improved so much over the years, the editing programs and so on. However I found that now because you no longer have to develop your film we not longer value printing our memories. We just store it on social media, a CD/DVD, USB, our phones and maybe up in the cloud. 10 years ago I had all my sons baby photos on digital files. Stored on a external hard drive. Left to sit. One day my daughter was running around and tripped on a cord which was attached to this hard drive, sadly it fell to the ground and no longer worked. I lost ALL my memories of my son. I only had a few printed and the most precious moments of his new existence were gone in a flash. Social media was just starting to become a thing so I had a few uploaded to Facebook but to download and save them the try and print them... the quality is no longer any good.
I felt like I failed as a Mom. I cried so hard. I was devastated.
I have so many prints of my daughter in albums, the negatives stored in a box so if I need to reprint I can. She can go and look back and see who she was, what she was like as a baby and who she was surrounded by when she was little. She can actually hold within her grasp her memories. My son can't see that. He can't hold those memories as close to him as she can. When I look back, I regret not printing and not creating these albums of their memories, of our memories as time goes by.
Today, I have SO many photos on digital, stored away and still rarely seen by my children. They don't have social media - Facebook being the biggest - to just go on and look at all the digital albums of their childhood. What good are those albums on social media? I get it, you want to show family and friends who you don't regularly see. That is great, that is why we have social media is to connect with those who we can't always see. However in the present, in the now right in front of you, have you printed your images to hold without turning on a device?
Have you experienced your phone crashing? Maybe it fell and broke? Did you have those images backed up? What did you do with your wedding images? Your family photos? I've talked with couples that I photographed 10 years ago and asked, What did you do with your digital wedding images? Almost all of them said, they are in a box. We only printed one photo, or we printed none. The disc, somewhere lost among storage...forgotten.
When I grew up, I was ALWAYS looking at our family albums. Laughing at my parents with their clothing style, hair styles and seeing all the memories through pages of albums. This is what they did before I came along. The dirt bikes, the beautiful cars, the parties, the friends and family. Then there was me. Baby photos, images of me with my Great Grandparents, cousins, family gatherings. Our pets, my first kitty, the places we lived and the welcoming of my baby sister. I got lost in those memories, daydreaming. I probably looked at those albums at least once a week. Those were our real story books.
A couple years ago I went to visit my Grandmother. She brought out a bag of loose photographs. Not stored in any album, no rhyme or reason just a bag of memories. Memories from when she was a teen to all her grandchildren (great great grandchildren I might add) and the stories she told me. The way her face lite up telling me these stories.. my heart was full. The beautiful black and white photos that seemed like they were just printed yesterday, the style. The history. Just amazing to hold onto these cherished memories passed down from generation to generation.
A personal goal of mine is to print more. To create albums for my children to sift through. My youngest son is always on my case about looking at photos from our past trips to Drumheller which I have to go back and find because it is stored on an external drive. I make sure I gift my children prints to put up on their walls. Our memories are certainly worth investing in. My youngest daughter LOVES to look at the photos on her wall. I've had them up there since she was little. Photographs of her, our family and extended family. When she wakes up from a nap you can hear her through the monitor saying "Mommy, Daddy... Kylie" She giggles. She has a sense of who she is more than ever because of those photographs on her wall. We have photos of my hubby and I and our family framed. I am currently working on a set of fantasy images of my children to put up on the wall... as soon as I finish painting said wall!
So for 2018 I have changed what I offer with my photography packages. I want to cherish prints more than digital and I want all my clients to as well, seriously YOU will thank me for it! Printing your images, creating albums... this tangible medium does not go obsolete. Not like over the years with computers.... the floppy disk, the CD (some computers don't take them now... especially if you only use tablets and phones) and when is the USB going to be gone? How are we going to look back at our memories in 20 years when you can no longer plug in a USB? An album though.... it will be right in front of you, on a book shelf. Ready for your children to grab, browse through and giggle and laugh at our past. We owe it to them, we owe it to ourselves to invest in our memories. To invest in the tangible. I will still be offering digital images however I want to make sure you walk away with a piece of art or an album so we can say you did something with those images and not just loose them to the digital age.
Printing my photos and creating a sense of who we are is very important to me. I personally don't have any photographs of me growing up before Grade 8 - no school photos, no family photos. Nothing for my children to look back on. These photographs aren't lost, just in a place where I can no longer access them. Oh the stories I could tell my children... hopefully one day they will see who I was when I was younger... so they can laugh at my horrible hair cuts and weird neon clothing! The image above is an album I put together when I was in high school, I was gifted my first Kodak camera (there is a photo of me in this album with that said camera) and I documented a lot of my high school years... my son Aidan pointing out his Grandpa, who was probably around my age now! Always up for a good laugh looking at these photos!
A few months ago I asked a cousin who a couple years ago put together a family reunion book - she has been posting to social media photographs from our family from generations ago and I asked her Why are these photographs important to her?
Her response:
I believe the photographs are important in remembering and grounding us. When you look back and put it into perspective what "your" family had made it through. Not all times are fantastic, but there is nothing like reminders of our humanity and just seeing how far we have come. In respect to old photos like this...it's also a reminder how little we really need. I love the simplicity of the days, to see the babies, the gatherings, the styles, the hair, the houses, the modes of transportation.
On another note... these look fantastic blown up on stretch canvas. I have one in my little hair salon that was a tiny little black and white photo... it makes me so happy to have it "big" where I can appreciate and study it.
Aunt Lillian and I were talking last year after I bugged everyone for photos.... She said you know what... I put them all back up again on my wall so I could see them after they had been put away. Sometimes it's hard to see all the "missing" loved ones...but having these around makes you realize they have been with you in your heart all along. - Holly LeFrancois
I am grateful for social media because even though we live in different cities and our family is so big that having these images posted was amazing to see. I would have never laid eyes on these in my lifetime. To know that these old photographs exist and Holly was able to share them through this medium is just wonderful. I am happy to have family, even though we don't' know one another that well, that cherish these moments and have put in so much time to find out the history and to share it with all of us!
Let's continue to value and invest in the tangible. This is our legacy, these are our memories!
