Why do we love printed photos?

 With Labor Day in the rear view mirror and the children back in school, there is an air of settling down to business again. Although my business never stopped  for the summer, fall is a time when things pick up and gain momentum on the downhill slope to the holidays. My studio is in the attic and can get a bit toasty in the summer, especially when, as happened a few weeks ago, the air conditioning stopped working! The cooler weather is the perfect time to ramp up the studio sessions! Fall is also a beautiful time for outdoor sessions as the trees begin to change color. I've also had a number photos to restore recently. I am looking forward to a busy season!

In preparation for intensified networking, I put together a soft covered book of some of my client work over the last year. You sell what you show, so these were all family and business clients, the main genres I want to promote. The book didn't cost much to make but people seem to love looking at printed examples of my work! It definitely beats showing pictures on a cell phone!  Some of those I showed it to were featured in the book and, far from being annoyed, they seemed to take it as a badge of honor to "make the book"!! It underlined again the love affair we have with printed photographs, even in this day of "digital only".

Before the Digital Era, the drug store printed all the pictures on the roll of film- even the duds- in duplicate! Are you old enough to remember the excitement of picking up your pictures so you could see how they came out?  Digital images are different; we can see them at once but they don't exist unless we print them. So, while prints have become devalued in people's minds, they are actually more valuable. If the computer crashes, the card gets wiped accidentally or the cell phone goes for a swim, your images have gone. Unless you print them.

Photo Restoration is a part of my photography business because those printed photos have a place in our hearts. I have digitally restored photos that have been carried in a wallet through combat, or come through fire or flood. We can scan our old photos and store them safely in the cloud but the physical image, displayed in a frame on the wall will be something we look at every day.  I hope some day, the pictures I take will mean that much to my clients. Children grow up and loved ones grow old.  Photographs are time capsules, freezing our memories.  Chances are, it won't be the digital files on a flash drive that are passed down to future generations, but the heirloom prints I make for them. Those prints will be treasured, and displayed for all to see.