You Took a Great Pic, Now What? The Digital Age Conundrum
It’s hard to imagine our parents as youngsters, but a quick flip through the family photo album, or a glance at dated photos on grandma’s walls are reminders of a time that once was –bouffant hair, women donning dresses on the daily, and kids sporting saddle shoes. Photos are magical – they are historic records of frozen moments that have survived moving boxes, sun exposure, and living between pages of old books. Photos age gracefully, black and whites topping the list of the crème de la crème. Photo lab processed photos (compared to their modern-day inkjet counterparts) show their resilience and tenacity through time.
Throughout generations, we have evolved from a ‘basic need’ to a ‘stuff hoarding’ society, collecting trinkets, electronics, and cultural artifacts along the way, and with that, our space has become smaller (or our ‘stuff’ grew bigger!)
Enter the digital age – documents and photos are scanned and stored on devices the size of a pack of gum, picture frames have become obsolete, and walls are decorated with rotating digital art, images changing at the ready. With this urge to purge also comes a more available opportunity to document everything – and by everything, I mean just about everything – from your morning cup of coffee to a commuter manspreading on the subway, with every conceivable moment that unfolds throughout the day. Imagine the millions of photos posted to the World Wide Web daily, living inside our smartphones, so magically held in the palm of our hands.
With our digital devices, we are able to snap, chat, and post to a global audience, all documentarians in our own right. We are creating and consuming pixels at an exponentially fast pace, but are we preserving?
What if, at any moment, the heavens opened and rained upon our digital cloud, our electronic devices zapped by their thunderbolt and lightning ports, and all of the world’s digital data disappeared? Would you have a backup? Probably not. If you’re like most folks, you probably haven’t printed a photo in years, but I’m sure you have a digital ‘photo roll’ on your smartphone of the last concert you attended – you know, where you zoomed in all the way to take a photo of a moving blurry musical icon on stage under extreme low light conditions, and proudly showed it off on your social media channels.
Go ahead, try printing self-proclaimed ‘awesome’ photo and tell me what you think. What, it’s not an ‘award-winning’ photo outside of your 6-inch mobile screen? It’s not your fault. You see, in our feverish attempt to document and post the doings in our lives, we fail to consider quality and longevity. What quality do you expect of a 12-megapixel photo from a smartphone’s 1/2.55” sensor size, compared to a DSLR/mirrorless camera’s sensor, clocking in at 4-5 times greater? Good enough for the average digital screen, for sure, but is it print worthy? Probably not. And here’s the conundrum: in this digital world, we aren’t preserving or printing our memories in a tangible format, nor are we consistently utilizing technology to capture images at the highest quality available. In the end, if that digital cloud should evaporate, and all of our images were zapped into the abyss, what photo memories would remain? Probably none. The answer is simple: backup (everything you want to keep), print (everything you can’t live without), and preserve (in the most controlled conditions possible) – your future memories will thank you.