I saw a little boy peering through a digital camera at a park bench. He was taking many pictures at very close range, possibly quite artistic ones in an abstract way. Grandma bustled over, saying: “Stop wasting the film, William!” The mother sipped her coffee and sighed: “It’s OK mum, it’s DIGITAL. It doesn’t use film.”
Years ago, I reluctantly gave up on film when it became too expensive to develop. However, I still try to keep my photo albums of printed photos (almost) current. It is a slow and sometimes tedious process of sifting and sorting and procrastinating …
1. Take far too many pictures. Download them to computer.
2. Import photos in to Adobe Photoshop Elements. Wait a few days for Paul to tag them (location, people, event etc). Leave them for a while.
3. When ‘print photos’ has been on my list of things to do for many weeks, I start doing the first photo cull. Delete the following:
• any shots where I look confused, odd and/or old
• the 20 extra shots of the same scene that we took ‘just in case the first one didn’t work out’
• any photos where the kids had runny noses, strange bruises or too much blue icing on their faces.
Then I get bored.
4. A few weeks later, go back and realise that we still have too many photos. Delete even more photos of the kids looking cute. We have lots of those already.
5. Finally upload the limited selection to Flikr. This is our online backup of hi-res files.
6. Then transfer from Flikr to Snapfish for printing. Feel a bit worried when I see that the shopping cart has $80 of photos to print. Make a cup of tea.
7. Delete more photos from shopping cart. Make the order and wait for pictures.
8. A few days later, pictures arrive. I flick through them and leave them on the shelf next to the photo albums. Some time passes.
9. I put the pictures in chronological order, and then slot them in to the photo album. I write in dates pictures were taken and some locations. Hooray – the photo albums are up to date. (NB: Since step 1 above, we have taken many many more pictures… sigh …)
10. A few months later, upload some to Facebook.
Is it worth it?
Brought to you by the InterWeb – your face is as big as my bed
I love you so much that I made your face my duvet cover – see personalised bedding! I can imagine a charming picture of hubby as the duvet and a lovely child on each pillow.
A life less digital 