These days, with all of the digital media out there, people often neglect to preserve actual photographs, and in many cases never even have photographs printed. Before digital cameras, physical prints of pictures were one of the only tangible ways to preserve your memories. Whether you had a fancy camera or a simple snapshot camera, or even if you just used a disposable, you still ended up with pictures in hand.

Before the digital age, getting your photos developed was like receiving a surprise gift. After a trip with friends or family, you would take your five or six rolls of film to the drugstore. You would often be too excited to wait overnight, so you would choose the one-hour photo service, and check your black sport watch repeatedly, waiting until the hour had passed.

Looking at the photos was always a great end to a vacation. You could relive the beautiful hike you took in the mountains, or laugh at the shot of your brother showing off the men’s sport watch he paid way too much for at a gift shop. Looking through the photos and placing them in an album was all part of the experience.

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!

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