Friday, December 26, 2008

Digital Photography

I love the digital age. I love that I can take as many pictures as I want and not worry about wasting film. I love that I can see my pictures right away. I love how easy it is to alter my photos, remove red eye, crop, etc. I love how easy it is to upload my pics to any number of photo sites to get them printed.

What I DON'T love is that this process seems to take me days. How do you choose which photos to print when you take 100 at every occasion? Once I do finally narrow it down and actually get them printed, I'm still not done. I still have to find the time to scrapbook them. For this reason, I typically end up printing pictures once a year. And it's always after Christmas. I get excited because "Look look! Walgreens is doing 4x6 prints for only $.10! I can't pass up only ten cents each!"

So that is what I have been doing for much too long today. And that is what I will be doing all day tomorrow. Uploading, cropping, and debating how many prints I need of BG carving a pumpkin. Then I have to decide which pictures I will need for the next 12 months. Which ones does JM want for his office? Which disc has the family photos on it? Why do we not have more pictures of us as a couple? Will I really scrapbook the two pictures from the one afternoon that BG looked really cute, but there was no story behind it? But if I don't print them and memorialize the moment, why did I even bother getting out the camera in the first place? Should I wait to scrapbook until I get prints from the pictures my mom took? Will that ever happen?

AAAaaaaggggggggghhhhhh!!! Now I remember why I only do this once a year. It's too exhausting. Does anyone have an easier method for this chaos?

6 comments:

Nikki said...

Erm...no, not really! We have so little space in our apartment that I very rarely print out pictures, so they all stay on my external hard drive waiting for me to have a flash of brilliance and Photoshop them into an amzing blog post, or they wait till we move to wherever we're going and I can print them out and decorate like I want. So yeah, not much help to you here! But I understand about 500 pictures per family event. I just can't delete any, even if they're terrible!

Kristina P. said...

I'm like Annike. I never print pictures off unless for gifts. In fact, if my blog ever crashes, I am screwed. That's where all my pictures are.

Unknown said...

I never have time for even scrapbooking so I just document them all on the computer so that once the time is there to sit down and spend hours at it I will get to it. Unfortunately that will be for many years to come since my two little ones seem to love being right in the middle of whatever project I am working on.

Riddle Girl said...

I just keep mine on my main work computer, my back up computer and my external hard drive. I am very worried about losing them since I have not printed any since I have gone digital in 2001. (Except for gifts.)
I have mine saved by year and then month. The girls like to sit down with me and go through them every so often. So maybe some day I will do some computer scrapbooking and print them that way!
Good luck with the project!

Mary said...

Hubby & I were just discussing backing up our pix on an external harddrive...b/c our desktop is old and could die at any moment.

I say print them if they are super cute, and put them in a plain photo album. Coming from a childhood that was never documented...I would kill to have more than 6 pictures of me as a kid. I know its hard when scrapbooking is so much fun...but if you print them (or back them up) you can scrapbook later, when they figure out how to squeeze more minutes into a day ;o)

Jessica said...

I'm so glad to hear I'm not the only one with this problem! Nice to know that other people have mounds of digital pictures laying unprinted on their hard drives.