09/23/2017
I have an urgent message I want to share about the importance of printing your pictures!
I absolutely back up my family's pictures and my clients pictures onto external hard drives. I have externals upon externals of storage crowding my office of images I have taken.
However...
I hope that no-one puts all of their trust in me, or any photographer you work with, to keep your sessions forever.. And I also hope that you don't put all of your trust into a CD or USB you receive from your session before printing your pictures out because I've mistakenly trusted my externals for my own pictures before printing them, and this is why I stress this problem.
At the end of 2016, my external hard drive crashed. Thankfully I have insurance through PPA and only had to spend $200 out of $1500 to have it recovered...but about 30% of my images - including clients - were nonrecoverable.
Today I was going through the hard drive they gave back to me with both the recovered and ruined files, and this is one of them of my own children that I took. Along with this image, there are SEVERAL others that are no longer able to be printed that I hadn't printed in the first place. Why didn't I? Well, because I constantly told myself "I'll do it soon", "tomorrow, I'll print them", "when I figure out how I want them printed, I'll do it", all while relying on technology to hold on to my precious pictures.
I'll go ahead and be completely honest, too. If you've inquired with or worked with boutique-style photographers like me, you've probably wondered why the digital files are a tad pricey, and sometimes even the same cost as the prints.
THIS is why.
Digital files are not complete pieces of art. They are for temporary archival purposes or for immediately sharing with friends and family. But they are not created to last forever, they are not heirloom, they are definitely not the best purpose for your beautiful pictures.
Aside from the fact that they are destructible on a grand scale (meaning, if a print gets messed up, that one print gets messed up. But if a USB of your pictures gets messed up - that ENTIRE collection of images gets messed up), they also may not be useable in years to come.
Think of VHS tapes, cassette tapes, even CD's. Most computers don't even come with CD drives these days!
For an even better visual, a USB of your images can be compared to the original film from a film camera. Today, it's much more difficult to get those images from a roll of film than it was 50 years ago. Even so, if you damage a roll of film, most images will be unusable, just as it would be if you damaged your USB. However, we still have prints available from 20, 50, 100 years ago. Actually, did you know the oldest photograph is about 190 years old? Can we say that the longevity of a VHS, CD, or even a USB can match that?
My stomach turned when I saw this image and the several others that are not completely unprintable. This is actually a screenshot of the image because it wouldn't load in this post since there just isn't enough data there. This is a broken image that will forever remain on this external, and eventually we probably won't even have the resources left to open it.
I've been trying to implement a way to give my clients the incredible art they deserve, while also giving them the digital files they want so that they can immediately share with friends and family, and I think I'll finally be able to do that for 2018. When I receive our images from our own sessions, or when I finish pictures of my own family, I have the habit of letting them waste away on my computer because I think "I'll print them later", and I never do. I don't want that for my clients. I want them to immediately be able to enjoy them for now, for tomorrow, and forever, before technology does its damage.
If you have pictures sitting around on your desktop that have never left that safe haven, please print them soon. You absolutely won't regret it, I promise.
