Print Photography And Digital Photography
Written by man on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 in Other.
Before digital cameras become common, physical prints of pictures were the way that people preserved their memories. Whether you had a huge camera with many different flash settings and lens adjustments, a simple camera for taking snapshots, or even if you used disposable cameras, you got developed printed pictures. Now, with all of the digital media options we have, we take much less care in preserving photos, if we even print them at all.
You did not see the pictures as you took them, and often you forgot exactly what shots you took. After a family vacation where you took four or five rolls of film, you would take them into the drugstore and have them developed. If you chose one-hour developing service, you often waited anxiously, checking your black sport watch every five minutes to find out if it was time to pick up the pictures yet.
Looking through the photos was a fun activity and a great way to relive the memories of the vacation. You might come across a funny shot of the elephant at the zoo, or a sill picture of your cousin with the men’s sport watch he bought at the gift shop before a mountain hike. Putting the photos in an album was also a fun thing to do.
Digital cameras show us the photo immediately after it is taken, so we lose the element of surprise. Often times, if we are not satisfied with a shot, we erase it and take a new one. This may give us greater control over the finished product, but it means that we lose the fun of discovering that photo we forgot was ever taken.
Not only have we lost the surprise, but we have also lost the necessity of physical photo albums. More often than not, we simply take the digital camera, hook it up to our computer, and transfer the photos onto a CD, onto our hard drive, or onto a social networking site.
There are advantages to this, in that we can easily share photos with people who are not in the same place as we are. But we lose the fun of passing a photo album around the room and looking at the photos together. This is much harder to do around a computer screen.
With some effort, though, we can take advantage of the convenient things about digital photography, and preserve many of the good things about print photos. Almost every drug store with a photo developing service will also have a machine where you can order print photos. You can adjust your photos before you order prints, by cropping them or changing the colors. With a few scrapbooking tools, you can make beautiful albums, using the convenience of the digital age to enhance them!



































