If you don’t do it now, you probably wont.
Ok, I’m guilty of this, like everyone. I have those photographs of my children that are so priceless and I share them proudly on facebook, and even save a copy into a folder of ‘someday to print’. Does it happen? Usually not. I’ll get to it. But then, as six months pass and then a year, you have greater images, and new treasures to add to that folder of neglect.
If you don’t preserve them on print, you will lose them eventually.
When I was dating my husband, and we were young, carefree, and travelled all the time, we loved to capture our journeys on camera. I’m totally dating myself here, but back in the myspace days, I had some great stuff on there! What a cute couple! Oh how sweet, are they in France? Spain? Then came the proposal. The happy couple. I treasured these images. Until my laptop crashed. As an i.t. person by trade at the time, I tried to no avail to recover beloved photographs. Gone.
Moving forward, our wedding day. We spent more money on our wedding photographer than on the rest of the wedding combined. Why? Well, because we valued photographs, and knew that once this day was gone, that’s all we’d have. Our wedding photography package came with prints, and we ordered a few wall size prints at the time (we’d just paid for our own wedding and couldn’t afford any canvases at the time). The rest of the beautiful images were sent to us on a hi res dvd. They are gorgeous. That dvd represents the most important collection of images we have. Timeless. Except one thing. We’re about to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary, and guess how many images we’ve gone back and ordered since? Or even printed ourselves? ZERO. Did I mention, my current computer and laptop do not even HAVE a dvd drive? Yes I can get an external one and plug it in and figure it out, but it is getting more and more cumbersome to deal with outdated media. And that is what we all have… media formats that will soon be deemed useless. To be totally honest, I haven’t even looked through the dvd in almost ten years.
Prints are touchable, real, and forever. (If you go through a professional, with archival quality images).
What I do have, is an album of prints from my original wedding package. That album is gawked at over and over, my children love to look through it and laugh at how daddy was crying, and how pretty mom looked. They love it.
We capture photographs to preserve time. To stop time, and save that moment forever. But when we fail to print them, and have something tangible from those memories, we lose them over time. There’s nothing sadder to me.
Today I challenge you to send your favorite ten images from your collection to a lab, and have them printed. You won’t be sorry, but you will be crushed when technology fails you and they are gone.