This past year while attending the Wedding and Portrait Photographers International convention, many speakers mentioned that we needed to print more images.  With the digital age and all the social media, most images that are captured are never printed.  They instead sit in hard drives and memory devices everywhere.  So why do we need to print them?  I don’t know maybe it is just me but there is something different about seeing and holding a printed image.  It is also a nice thing to print and display those images in places that we and others can daily enjoy them and the memories they invoke.  Also with the way technology is, who knows if sometime in the future we will have something that can read those files or even that they did not just simply  become corrupted and disappeared.  But perhaps one of the nicest things is that they are like creating little pieces of buried treasure.  We often will print a picture and then store it away.  Those images lay hidden waiting to be rediscovered, often in times when we most need them.  We seem to look for or find these little gems when we have lost something or someone in our lives.  They then bring those needed smiles or tears and help us to remember.  It is amazing how valuable those pieces of paper with some ink on them become.  Sure they may not be in great shape or have begun to fade but the memories they produce is always just as intense.  And all too often people don’t realize the value and power of a photograph until it is too late.

 

I attended a memorial service as well as our church’s 90^th Anniversary Celebration last week, in both cases the pictures, and I am sure many were from prints, brought back nice memories but also let me glimpse the history of both this person and this organization long before they were the entities I know so well. Here is another thing if you give someone a picture odds are that they may keep it somewhere whereas if you send them a file, I would thing the odds of them keeping or being able to find it are quite slim.  Here are a couple pictures of my Mom that my Auntie had.  I am so glad that we got them since all of our old pictures were destroyed when our house burned down.  So get out there, take and have pictures taken of you and your family.  And remember to print some so you can create some buried treasure.  Treasure maps are optional of course.