A family album was more-often created during the point and shoot days of disposable cameras, and now in this age of ubiquitous technological advancements, everyone is walking around with a computer that photographs as well, but no one is actually printing their photos.
Photographed moments are not stored in the cloud forever, and everyone should be careful especially with those photographs they hold so dear. Photos of your first born child, photos of your aging parent, photos of that spontaneous trip you took last summer, of that friend you love; these are all worthy of printing. There are numerous added benefits to printing your photos, and most especially your professional photography.
Professional Photography is an art, and most of the time is commissioned for a very distinct reason. You want to collect the moments of your daughters first sweet sixteen, your son’s high-school graduation, your yearly holiday family gathering, and so on. There are so many events in life that are worth photographing, and most importantly worth printing (and with the consultation of a professional photographer).
But first, a little back story: I know because, when I was a young teenage girl, I had a laptop and camera and uploaded so many photos to my computer. Photos of my cat, of my sister and nieces, of friends from my youth, and specifically of Snoop Dog and I, when he visited my hometown. And even though there were not any (that I was aware of at the time) cloud based storage systems, to upload files to; there was hardware to burn digitals onto. Something I did not do.
I thought to myself, I could’ve printed a few of those photos, my favorite ones, for just a few cents; wrapped them in an album and safeguarded them that way. I would’ve still had those memories in a printed format. I do have many printed photos too, but from the disposable cameras that were necessary to develop. I still have the albums my mother created, and she has the albums from her childhood that her family helped her put together. Beautiful old film photos perfectly sealed in their album pages. She loves to look at them, and so do I.
There’s also the physical value of holding something in your hands, the tangible satisfaction of knowing you’ve captured a moment in the past and now are able to wonder in all its beauty. “When was this photo?”, “Oh, look this was my friend from high school”, “this was your first piece of strawberry”; these are the those small moments that will mean so much in the future.
Take some photos, upload them to your cloud storage service, save them on your hard-drive, and print them. Just print them, because it’s better to be safe than sorry. You will be so happy you did.
I’ve included a link to a hard drive, that I recommend as a back-up to your digital cloud based storage of your photos.