A gift for Dad

 

Fathers are notoriously difficult to buy gifts for!  After all, there are only so many ties and barbecue implements that even the Dadest of Dads can use! In our family, Father's Day is complicated by being only a few days before my husband's birthday. The result is, he often gets a combined gift and celebration. 

In many families, Mom is the curator of family memories. As a photographer, it is usually Mom who hires me to take family portraits, while Dad is happy to go along. What I've noticed, though, is that Dads love video. My son-in-law takes his tiny Go-Pro camera to every sporting event that his kids are in and even prepares a "highlight reel" at the end of the season! Back in the 90s, my husband had a bulky video camera with which to record family memories. The small VHS tapes fit into a converter to be played on your VHS video player. Everyone had one of those, right? The problem is, no one has one now! We have video cartridges that have sat in a shoe box for a quarter century with no way to look at them. A generation further back, grandpa probably took reel to reel 8mm film. 

Film and video tapes are fragile things and deteriorate over time. I recently signed up with a company called Forever, which offers a solution to the dilemma of changing formats. They will take your video, VHS tapes, 8mm film, as well as negatives, slides and printed photos, and digitize them. The best part is, their digitization facility is in Green Bay Wisconsin, not somewhere in Asia! I have just sent 10 VHS-C cartridges from the 1990s to be digitized. I'm not absolutely sure what is on them, because I don't have any way to play them, so it will be a red letter day when they are finished and we can watch them again! I think one of the videos is of my sister's wedding and others are of family vacations when our adult children were young. Forever also offers cloud storage that you buy, rather than rent, and a guarantee that your pictures and videos will be safe for your lifetime plus 100 years! Their plan is to migrate the media they store for you to whatever new format becomes standard as formats change over time. 

I plan to incorporate Forever into my business and offer cloud storage to my clients, especially those whose weddings and special events I photographed many years ago. Technology changes so fast-what is widely available and accessible now, will be next year's has-been fad. You need to store your pictures somewhere and, as Shutterfly and Google have recently shown, not every company cares about your precious memories. In the past, we printed our pictures and put them in books. In many cases, those printed pictures have lasted decades, while the digital pictures you took with your cell phone, only lasted as long as the phone. if you would like to know more about Forever, click on this link: 
Forever Ambassador Joanna Carlberg

So what will you get for Dad this year? How about a trip down memory lane?