Just 8 short years ago film cameras were king and everyone owned one. Life was somehow better for your pictures then. You would put the film into the camera, shoot 24 or 36 photos and drop it off at your favorite lab. In around an hour or so you had double prints of all the pictures and they were very happy.
Like most tales of the days of old, this is partly based in truth. In 2000, more film was sold and processed than ever before. These were the days before the digital revolution, when a 1 mega pixel camera would cost you $1000 and that was good. Your pictures were happy then, sometimes they would sit in the camera until the "whole roll" was used but that was it. You would pop out the film and every picture would be printed. They would then be put into a family photo album and stored for later generations to giggle at. . . . your pictures were happy.
Fast forward to 2008, there is literally an onslaught of digital cameras available to today’s consumer. You can get one for far less than $1000, and with far more features than film cameras could have ever dreamed about. The question has all this technology made your pictures happy?
I would have to say, no and the reason is that we have begun to take our photography for granted. Pictures have become images, digital images available at the touch of a button. The magic of pictures seems to have been replaced with instant gratification of the digital image. We can view our "images" instantly and dismiss them just as quickly. Erasing a moment in time almost as quickly as it happened. Gone is the magical experience of waiting with Christmas like anticipation for your photos to be printed, marveling and even reliving the moments as you view the pictures. Somewhere along the line in this digital revolution it seems that we have minimalized the importance of our photographic memories.
Maybe it's because digital cameras are everywhere. Honestly, count up the cameras in your house right now. I was shocked when I did this. We have no less than 12 cameras in our home. These are all digital cameras, not a single film camera to be found. How do we have so many? Well being a pro photographer certainly adds to the number but that isn’t the 1/2 of it. Every phone, computer and child has a digital camera. The phone I am writing this article on has a camera. I went back and reviewed the pictures on my phone (which I have never downloaded) I was amazed to see images from as much as 4 years ago stored on my card. These are not happy photos; they have been trapped in digital purgatory for so long I had forgotten that they were even there.
To make my pictures happy, I have since downloaded them and printed them. They will now be available for my family & friends to review for years to come. I suppose the reason I call these "happy" pictures is because they make people smile. Printed photos have the ability to draw families together and remind them of the things that were the very most important at that moment the picture was taken.
So get your pictures out of that digital camera, print them and spend some time reliving the moments with those that are the most important to you. Trust me, it will make your pictures happy.
