Many of us use photography as a sort of memory bank for the daily doings of our lives.
Special occasions,
Family milestones,
Holiday snaps.
Digital photography has meant that many of us now have hundreds, possibly thousands of these photos stored on cameras or our computers.
Many of the photos are poor. Digital photography makes it easy to snap away until we get the photo we are happy with but how many of us then delete all the ones that aren't so good?
But what do you do with the photos next?
Do you print them out and put them in Family Albums ?
I'm afraid I don't any more.
Yet I know the pleasure that we get from flicking through old albums and looking back at our parents' photos.
When it comes to holiday photos we usually use them to make slide shows using Movie Maker.
I hasten to say these slide shows are for US to view, not to bore our friends with !!!
We have lots of photos and we put most of them in, along with some text to remind us where and when and try to fit the music to the country ( we usually buy special CDs ). They usually go for about 20 minutes and cover about a week of our holiday at a time.
Very often, on a Saturday, when we come home from buying our fruit and vegies at the market we settle down with a late breakfast and watch a couple of holidays. .... and I think it is because we do this, we remember them so well.
But this not all we do with those holiday snaps.
I have begun a tradition of making an album on the computer. You know the sort that you have printed up as a lovely glossy book. I've made two of these so far.
The first one I made when we holidayed in England for 14 weeks in 2008.
I used my daily holiday diary for the text, enjoying re-living the holiday as I went.
The second one is about our month in France in 2010 and is just about as long as the other book !!
I used a program called Momento - a free download and fairly simple to use - and the albums were around $200 each. Not cheap, but something to treasure and paid for in part by gift vouchers so even better.
I'm just starting on a third - about our holiday in England last year - and this time I'm trying another program called Blurb. It's another free download and much less expensive so we'll see how the end product compares with the others.
****** ******* *******
Of course some people take photos for other reasons - photography is a great hobby.
Tony is one of these people and he enjoys experimenting with all sorts of effects, manipulating his photos with different camera settings and lenses. He is really becoming very good
So now I have a whole lot of photos that I have specially taken for this post.
Will I delete them... or just leave them sitting there?
What do you think?
Cheers.
I used to be happy with just one or two photos per holiday when we used film - it was too expensive to process many and of each film only one or two were good enough to keep and I used those I did save as memory joggers for the mental snapshot album in my head. Now that I can take as many as I want digitally I find I use the ones I want on my blog and always intend to go through the rest and delete most of them and print out the ones I feel are worth keeping but do I do it? No - it is always on my to do list and gets more and more daunting as more and more get added. It was actually quite liberating when I lost a load of them!!
ReplyDeleteI am trying to put together my family photos in a scrapbook so that one day my wanderer will have a few of each member and know who they are but that too is a job which never gets completed.
Those albums looked very professional. You said that the software was a free D/L and I assume that is for laying out the pages and formatting the text, but what was the A$200 for? Did you send the pages away to be bound into a book? Sounds expensive but I really don't know what that is in GB£.
ReplyDeleteCheers...B
How awful to lose things from your computer. We're back from in a week in Wales and I've been slowly catching up on blogs. I don't print out photos any more and all the ones I did have that were prints and not on the computer I scanned and got rid of! I do often look at photos on my computer though and I have back ups of everything (although I'm not solar flare proof yet which is always a worry!).
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of photobooks and am thinking about printing one up of our week away. I've heard great things about blurb and was thinking of using them, thought I've heard of other great sounding companies too. I'll be interested to see how your latest book turns out!
Jane:
ReplyDeleteSeems we have a similar outlook /problem with photos !
Bernard:
When you finally finish arranging all your photos into the program and your book is ready to print you send it off to the Momento people and they print up your book and mail it to you. You can send your finished book( in their program) by email or copy it onto a disk and send it to them. The cost is determined by the size of the book, the number of pages and the type of cover that you choose.
At the moment Aussie $200 is about 132 GBP.
The books are beautiful, glossy paged sturdy books. This is the Australian site http://www.momento.com.au/, don't know if it is a worldwide company but there has got to be a British equalivalent.
Cheers
I love your travel photo books. That's a great idea! Just this weekend Hubby downloaded over 3,000 photos I had stored on my iPhone to my laptop and then into our external hard drive. I never took photos before I started blogging. Now I take them all the time. I'm not so good at deleting them either. It is so different from when we were younger and everything was expensive when on film. I love being able to take a photo whenever I wish and not have to think about wasting film, flashes etc. Tony is quite the photographer by the way. One of projects is to transfer old family photos, slides, movies to DVD so we can give them to our families. Have a lovely day and I enjoyed this post very much.
ReplyDeleteI love Tony's photo of the harpist. You see the concentration in his eyes. You see his special relationship with the harp and I think Tony has given us just enough "information" - not trying to show everything - the harp, the man's body etc.. Super.
ReplyDeleteI think I might make a little album of digital photos myself. Mostly they just sit on my computer clogging up the memory but as well as Panoramio, I also put them on a British site called geograph. I have around 2400 photos there. It's about "mapping" the British Isles with photographs and it motivates me greatly when stepping out on my various walks.
I'm very diligent about deleting the duds, but I end up with a lot of photos anyway. You've given me some good ideas.
ReplyDeleteGreat post! I lost some a few years ago and now back them up onto a separate hard drive as well. Not much use if they both fail at the same time, but that is unlikely! I used to save them all onto CD, but don't do that any more. Your on-line photo journals look really lovely. What a great idea! Ros
ReplyDeleteI love those photo books. That's a great way to make a holiday memory really special.
ReplyDeleteIm pretty good at deleting junk photos but I still have plenty on my computer !
I have sooo many, but also have lost the precious old ones on dead hard drives :( I need a good nerd to try and extract them ! Lovely albums!
ReplyDeleteI hardly ever print out my photos these days. I have loads on my computer and they are all backed up on to the hard drive. I love the idea of photo album/journals, I made one this year, and will definitely make more. They are a lovely reminder of the holiday. The great thing about blogging is that now I have another source that saves all my photos.
ReplyDeleteWe just leave ours sitting here in folders but we also put them on CD's. Sometimes we flick through them and sometimes we put a memory card into the telly and watch them there, but the computer is better.
ReplyDeleteWe do delete the poorer ones, usually at the time on the camera.
In answer to your last question, I would say leave them there! You just never know when you might want them again and it may be easier popping back to where you left them last.
I meant to say how much I like these albums. They look just like the best of quality coffee table books, tailor made with all the places you love and none of the ones you don't love or don't know.
ReplyDeleteHelsie - that's a good idea to have your holiday books printed. I do try and delete photos I don't want to keep, use Photoscape to resize and crop those and delete the original. The only photos I print on photographic paper are reference photos of the quilts and other patchwork items I make and occasional photos of grandchildren when they were small to use as illustrations on birthday cards. Such a lot of my photos from SLR days are on slides, too, particularly of the children when they were small.
ReplyDeleteYou have some very nice souvenirs.