One of my favorite things to do when I go home for the holidays is sit in front of the fireplace with a good bottle of wine and go through album after album of my families memories. One late evening on a recent trip home, I was feeling particularly nostalgic…. so I did what I usually do… pulled out a good bottle of red, and plopped myself on the living room floor to settle in and reminisce. Then unexpectedly my almost 3 year old woke up and wanted to come snuggle with me for a bit. I obliged, because what mom doesn’t want to soak in “sleepy kid snuggle time” when offered voluntarily?!?!
As I sat on the floor with my daughter nestled in my lap, she was in awe over the photos we were looking through. She saw photos of me as a baby and said, “Look Mommy, its ME!”, giggled at her Grandmas hairstyle from the 80’s and was enthralled with her Grandpa’s Military Academy pictures. It was at that exact moment that an unexplainable feeling came over me, and I realized that while we live in a digital age and I can (and do) take photos and video regularly… how is she going to be able to sit on MY living room floor one day with her daughter… if there isn’t anything printed to go through?
Nobody wants to go to the lengths it takes to schedule, plan and prepare for their session, or even bigger… your wedding….. to only have digital files on a USB drive in a drawer, or post a few images on Social Media. I say this because whether we decide to admit it or not, the current Social Media platforms that are hugely woven into the infrastructure of our lives, both personally and professionally….. WILL go away one day. It will be replaced by something bigger and better. That is part of evolution of society….. and when it happens, will you want to take the time and effort to save the years and years of memories you have “posted”, or are you like my husband who has 4 cell phones filled with photos sitting in a drawer with all the CD’s of photos that you never do anything with? A printed image can ALWAYS be looked at. You don’t need to find the right kind of charger, or cross your fingers that the CD isn’t too scratched, or god forbid that having it sit there for so long unused didn’t make the whole thing corrupt somehow.
30 years from now your kids CAN pull out that album you had made and laugh at how “2014” you looked with your hipster glasses and infinity scarf, or shed a tear over your wedding prints hanging in our bedroom…. see the emotion on your face in the books you had created from their newborn session. Printed photos have not only an archive value that is beyond measure in so many ways, but evokes a completely different emotion than looking at a backlit screen.
