One Thing I wish I had of Done With My Photos......
My oldest son was born in 2006, just when the digital camera was starting to get big and before I owned a digital high tech camera of the day. 10 years ago (ugh doesn't seem that long ago) my camera was a good old film camera that I took everywhere, and I snapped photos of everything. From my pregnancy with my oldest right to his first birthday all ended up on a print that I keep in a box in my room. Sure some of those photos of my son's first bath, first breath, and first walk are all over my walls in frames, but most of them are kept in a box in my room. My 2nd son was born a year after my oldest. By this time I received my first digital camera. WhooHoo I was in love and I loved it! It was a small point and shoot Kodak camera that I kept in my purse to take out at any exciting baby/toddler moment my kids would have. The best thing about this camera was that I no longer needed to print film! At the time I thought this was the best thing in the world. How convenient was it that I could buy a little card that would hold A LOT OF PHOTOS and I mean A LOT OF PHOTOS!!!! This little card of convenience was so important to me for all the good reasons. It held photos of my children that I love and it held photos that I wanted to remember for ever. This little card made me lazy though. Too lazy to go to the store to print out the photos. Yeah, sure every few months I would wander into WalMart to the instant print machine and I would put the little card in and print off all my prints (or however many I could get for $15 on the worst photo paper you could ever use) but I never printed all of them, only a select few. See, the thing is that I no longer had the excitement of having my prints returned to me to see what I had captured with my camera. It stopped me printing photos of my 2nd son and made it easy for me to say "Yeah I'll print it and frame it later". I saw the photos the second I took them and I could save them to my computer and look at them there, I had no need to print them. This was my biggest mistake. You see we didn't have the cloud then, or ways to save things online with massive backup storage. Yeah sure FB was around and Myspace to save photos on, but you couldn't store your photos there. A few times my computer crashed which resulted in me losing photos. I even had my husband throw away an 8g memory card of mine that was filled with photosof the kids. I LOST SO MANY PHOTOS! All of this could've been prevented if I had simply printed these photos and kept them in an album or in a photo box. Photos that I will never get back or get to see again. You see, as a photographer I know the importance of these types of photos and what they mean to us parents and caregivers. Our children only grow up once and they are moments that slip by to fast. I wish I could turn back time and give myself a swift kick in the butt and tell myself "Print those photos" but I can't (I'd also remind myself to more moisturizer and see less sun and that those all nighters due to a toddler won't last forever). My best advice that I could give to my clients is to print. Order professional photos from your photographer, print those instagram photos of your little one (you can get them done in magnets online too) and print those photos that mean the world to you. Trust me your future you will be happy that you did it...... Technology will keep advancing and today's stuff will become tomorrows history, but your prints will last and be around for generations to come.
