Do you remember your first camera? After begging your parents for one and finally unwrapping it at Christmas or a birthday? Loading the film and then anxiously waiting for several days for it to be developed? Ahh nostalgia! Those days are long behind us as nowadays pretty much everyone has a smartphone with a camera of a much higher quality than anything we could have imagined years ago. Now at the swipe of a button we can capture images and video and instantly view them back to check we got the best angle and you can choose from a plethora of image editing apps and then upload them to Snapchat, Facebook and you can even print Instagram photos! Did you know that on an average day, we upload 1.8 billion photos to the internet?
There is something I miss about the old way though- the fact that you never knew how the images would come out and when you finally had them in your hand, there is no deleting and retaking of any dodgy ones as your crooked grin or half open eyes are preserved forever on a bit of paper. Nowadays, all we see is the cream of the crop, the best possible shot out of maybe 20, and they are usually edited and filtered to within an inch of their lives- there is no spontaneity behind todays photographs, and I think it is a bit of a shame!
Another thing that I used to love doing when I was young, was saving the best photos and putting them in a photo album, or even on a noticeboard on the wall- that way all of your best memories are displayed right there for you to see and be reminded of- whenever you want to see them. These days, our photo albums are virtual and we have to rely on a screen to show us the best of our past times.
Gone are the days of musty photo albums and scrapbooks, but maybe we should start printing images more? With so many options available for printing great quality images online, I think we should make more of an effort to print off our memoirs and display them. You can have them enlarged to poster size, printed on canvas, or even engraved onto wood or metal- the options are truly endless and with technology how it is, we should take advantage of it!
For me, nothing beats holding a photograph in my hand, putting it in a frame next to my bed, or thumbing through a book of images. What happens if there is a digital glitch, or we get a social media account hacked? All of those images are gone forever and all we have left is what is in our minds. It is for this reason, I think we need to start printing again, appreciating the physical form of our memories and keeping them around us to remind us of fun times, great people, and wonderful recollections.
