Print Photography And Digital Photography

Remember when pictures were actual physical objects held in your hand, and not just images on a computer screen? Whether you used a disposable camera, an expensive professional camera, or a regular snapshot camera, you ended up with an envelope of printed photos. Now, with digital photography, we often never even print out our photos, and if we do, we don't take much care in preserving them.

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.

The fun of looking through the photos was a great way to top off the vacation itself. You might find a shot of a gorgeous sunset above a lake, or a funny candid photo of your brother showing off the men's sport watch he bought on impulse at a rest stop. Looking through the photos, and filing them in an album, you live the memories once again.

Now, with digital cameras, we see a photo seconds after we have taken it. If we are not one-hundred percent satisfied with it, we can erase it and take it again. This gives us greater artistic control over the photos we end up with, but it takes away the element of surprise. No longer after a trip do we have the pleasure of coming across a photo we had forgotten was ever taken.

Because of digital photos, people often do not make photo albums anymore, not physical ones anyway. Instead they just transfer the photos onto a hardrive or cd, or put them in an album on 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 a little effort, you can enjoy the convenience of the digital photography age without losing all the pleasures of looking at and sharing print photos. Most drug stores have machines where you can order prints of your digital photos. You can crop them and play with the color schemes, or just print them as they are. Buy some photo albums and some scrapbooking tools, and get started. You can use the versatility of digital photography to enhance the art of preserving your memories.