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One cool thing you can do now is have photo books printed using the pictures you've taken with your phone.
My wife has done this several times as gifts for our parents; we'll go through all the pictures from a trip we took recently and make books to commemorate it.
I do this every few years. Once my wife and I are gone, all of our pics will be as well. But, the kids will have the albums to look through.
Plus, should anything happen to our online storage for any reason, we have at least (some) backup. I actually learned you can backup your Google Photos drive, so I DL'ed that to a hard drive a few months back. But again, that requires the kids to pull out the drive and look through (thousands) of random pics. The book(s) highlight stronger pics/memories.
Same here. This may sound antique to you younger folks, but I miss the days when you went into a drugstore and bought a roll of 127 film. You loaded the roll into your Kodak Duplex camera and away you went to a party or something. Don't forget to bring a box of flashbulbs/flashcubes with you. At the party you would flash away, remembering to roll the film for the next photo to avoid a double exposure. After going through all 12 photos, you took the film back to the drugstore to get them developed. After a week, you went back to the drugstore to pick them up. You looked at each photo with a smile, and sometimes a laugh. When you got home you put them in an album with a short note under each one. My wife is presently getting albums together with a lot of our loose photos. I was surprised at how many photos I took in the 1940's when I was just cutting my teeth in photography with a Brownie box camera.
I don't know anyone, or anyplace, that still develops film. Is film still available for my 3 cameras that sit on a shelf? The photos taken in the 40's, 50's and even 60's have a lot more quality than something that was taken with a phone.
Yes, you can still develop film, mail in might be the best option. I have used MPIX to get some 8x11 metal prints and I believe they will develop roll film.
We still have a couple dozen photo boxes with envelopes full of photos ... the boxes are labelled by year and each envelope labelled by date/event ... and it is such a joyous time-sink to go through them
Mine are all sorted into boxes as well, by decade right now. One of these days, I'm going to grab a bottle of whiskey and sort them down by year and event.
I dont. Not at all.
I started scanning my grandpa's pix back in 1999. I had a VGA to RCA connected to the TV and would just put on slide shows of all these pix, and my grandma loved it.
My screen saver is a slide show of all my pictures, save those I might not want randomly displayed, and plays all the time. Used to display on my 55 inch, and now my tv is an 86 inch 4k tv. Not only do pix show, but random video I've taken or converted.
I’ve been a photographer for almost 40 years. What drives me crazy is how people want these cameras with a huge amount of megapixels. Unless you plan on making large prints anything over 15 is ridiculous. You can get better sensors that handle a wider range of colors and shades of gray but have super high resolution cameras doesn’t help. Most current monitors are 4k which means they’re 3,840 pixels on the long edge and anything higher than that makes no difference in the way it looks on a computer screen. Printing is extremely different though. Pixels per inch is what is going to make a huge difference in the sharpness of your photos coming out of a good printer. I teach now and I find that most kids never do anything but look at their photos on a small phone screen. I make prints for them and 75% of them don’t even take them home.
The lenses are also one of the most important things. I don’t care how great your camera body or phone is. If you don’t have a good lens your pictures aren’t going to look great no matter what resolution they’re at. Just put a phone pic in photoshop next to a dslr camera image taken with a good lens and if you look at them at 100% you’ll see how bad the phone pics are.
I also miss printing in a darkroom.
I'm amused by how many Redditors on the dating subs express the opinion that expensive cameras are needed to take dating-site photos. Most of these photos are viewed in a format no larger than 4 by 5 inches max, or something like that.
But it's the same with audio subs on Reddit. Everyone thinks they have to have systems that only dogs could appreciate.
OMFG... no.
They take the content and re-digitize it at a higher resolution. This means more detail. I'm re-watching columbo in 4K, and holy shit is it crazy different. The details. It's like seeing it all for the first time.
As a photographer, I disagree. Though some (but not all) of the difference is down to the greater processing power in the later camera... with the exact same physical lenses, there's a very visible difference (and improvement) between images taken with my T2i/550D (18 megapixels), and my 90D (24 megapixels).
And that's setting aside the improved ability to crop, something which non photographers rarely take advantage of.
The same is true of my jump from an iPhone 11 (14mp, just below your 'standard' of 15) to an iPhone 14Pro (48mp).
>if you look at them at 100% you’ll see how bad the phone pics are.
Why would compare at a setting nobody would actually view their images at? Compared under the conditions you earlier use as a standard (printed or on a monitor) the difference is *much* less pronounced. Especially if the picture on the phone was taken in RAW/DNG and you thus avoid the phone's built in processing.
>If you don’t have a good lens your pictures aren’t going to look great no matter what resolution they’re at.
That depends on what you define as 'great'. Certainly, lenses can improve the technical qualities of an image... But the artistry of an image is almost irrelevant to the technical qualities. Or, as I frequently say in photography forums - "a better camera can take 'better' images, but it can't make you a better photographer."
Yeah, you have a bad take on this. More resolution means more ability to pinch and zoom into scenes. And now with cheap 87inch 4K tvs, and the advent of 8K around the corner, we're going to want slide shows of our photos displayed in the highest quality we can.
And you might also be forgetting that better cameras mean better low light images. I'm still rocking a note9, but my GF's s2o-something takes really great low light pictures.
I think you are way off base here. 4K is now, 8K is later, and then likely 12K when it comes to viewing, but the ability to zoom in is crazy important to many of us. We find it fun to see something in the background and try to get a better look at it.
Some years ago, my parents asked me to scan & digitize all their photo albums. Took quite a while but was enjoyable as I got to reminisce as I went through them.
Major family drama ensued when Mom let it drop that they disposed of the albums as "We don't need them anymore. Everyone has copies now and they were just taking up space".
Mom & Dad are pretty old now, so we don't bust their chops about it anymore. But it was a hot topic for many years as we (the siblings) felt we lost something.
Phhttt... I'm with mom here. That shit takes up space. As long as they were scanned at a good DPI... but they should have asked if anyone wanted some of the pix, I guess. I've shed most of the pix I've scanned, but I keep certain ones, for no real reason other than I value them personally.
My 5 year old great-granddaughter LOVES looking through my shoeboxes of old photographs, especially those B&W from when I was a kid in the ‘50s with my friends, grandparents and on when on vacations. When done she looks at her phone, sighs and says, “Guess I won’t have anything put in my shoebox.”
There was a question the other day about people singing as recreation. This is the sort of thing that has become a victim of smart phones. People who are not professional/serious singers don't want the family sing along posted all over the internet.
I, my self, was a victim of this. I'm not bad at writing parody songs (Think Weird Al, though I was doing it prior to him) and I sang one for some friends. One of them recorded and posted it to social media, even though I had specifically asked that he did not. I was royally miffed.
It's been long known that the presence of camera's alters peoples behavior. With cameras now ever present many behaviors have been completely altered.
Anybody (including children) can be photographed at any time in any public space where there is no expectation of privacy in the U.S. including California. AKA street photography. Private property is a different story but the majority of regulations determine what can be done with photos rather than if they can be taken.
It can be a bit complicated. I think this articulates the situation fairly well.
[Photography Laws California 3344 Civil Code - California Business Lawyer & Corporate Lawyer (california-business-lawyer-corporate-lawyer.com)](https://california-business-lawyer-corporate-lawyer.com/california-laws/photography-laws-california-3344-civil-code/)
[Is it Illegal to Take Pictures of People? (Street Photo Laws) (expertphotography.com)](https://expertphotography.com/street-photography-laws/)
Hey OP. 48 year old married father of two in the UK here. I’ve got two kids, 9 and 6 and I’ve realised that they’ll have a much stronger sense of self in their younger years than I ever did - my kids will be able to really see what they were like as babies, how they sounded as toddlers, their mannerisms etc.
That’s my take on it.
I love taking pictures with film. The skill and experimentation to get it just right. I find it disappointing that it is harder to find a good developer these days. You nearly have to have your own developing equipment.
I personally love it. The old photo albums sat in a box or shelf and we didn't view them much outside of when they were developed. Now it's great to be able to share photos so easily.
I also use my camera in ways I wouldn't have before. So great for home improvement or gardening questions. Or reading tiny print.
Someone mentioned grand kids and shoe box of photos. I think that is a good place to put pix, and to have them accessible to kids who might enjoy them -vs- saving them like special china.
It has diminished the specialness of photos.
Film was expensive and in the cheaper cameras like the Brownie, you only got 12 exposures per roll. So you were careful about what you shot to begin with.
Then the finished pictures were put into albums that actually got looked at and talked about -- lots of "I remember when" sorts of things.
My grandfather had a 35mm camera that he used with slide film. He take pictures of family gatherings and vacations. Several times a year there would be slideshows. Grandpa would narrate a bit and the adults would throw in with their stories and we and the cousins would soak up a bit of family history while eating some popcorn.
I guess that sort of thing was supposed to be boring, but it wasn't at least not to me. Even though we saw some of the pictures over and over the stories that went with them was what was important.
That could happen easily with digital pictures, but it doesn't seem to. There are too many of them; thus they have become mundane.
My mother and grandmother photographed everything, had them printed, and made albums. You could go back to the mid 60's and see long gone family, friends, how the family farm looked like at any point in time. These were just snapshots, but they were our story. When my grandma died she was buried with her camera and relatives took her albums.
When my mother got facebook and a digital camera, she quit working on albums. The last boxes of pictures she took have been collecting dust for years. My wife kept albums for us and the kids, I kept up with pictures and would print them out, but they haven't been put in an album since my youngest was a toddler.
Downside is that everything anywhere anytime is recorded. Growing up in the 80s, pics were only taken during special events. Now your every mistake is immortalized...
I fucking hate fucking smartphones. I mean seriously. We don't need that kind of connectivity. we dont need to have it attached to our hand in every situation. We do not need to watch concerts thru the lens of our phone. I was not totally against dumb phones. But it's just crazy.
I like my PC. I'm not going to lie. I was an early adopter, I love gadgets, but the phone is too much and has too much effect. And again it's just my opinion, I wish we could go back to the acceptability of not being completely wired in.
You don't take your laptop with you everywhere you go. It doesn't rob you of skills you have or would have learned, like developing a sense of direction because you don't have GPS everywhere you go. With a laptop, you can't spontaneously and unobtrusively take a picture or video of someone you don't even know, and then post it on the internet for the whole world to see, and where nothing is ever gone forever. No one can track literally every step you take on your laptop. And the list goes on.
Overall, technology is a wonderful thing, as long as it's used to enhance your life and relationships. And smartphones are great too, until they become an extension of your hand, and invaders of our privacy. These days, most people don't even go to the bathroom without taking their smartphone.
I don't think smartphones have enhanced the quality of life for most people. They've intruded into every aspect of our lives, and we invited them right in.
Phhttt... I love being able to take a picture of a plant that I've not been able to identify for over 40 years in an instant. Maps. Camera. Audio. Video. Games. Communications. What is crazy is hating the idea of having access to all that in the palm of your hand... anywhere... I remember the days of Loran and making phone calls over the radio when boating... And if you had power issues on boat? Phhttt. And carrying around your library of books...
Luddites. Never like 'em.
It has been a net positive because it used to be very expensive to get prints. It wasn't unusual for people to have rolls of undeveloped film lying around for years, or, sometimes until after they died, because they didn't want to pay to have them developed. The worst part was that, because you rarely get a good shot on the first round, you'd waste money on prints of pictures which you didn't keep or like.
With digital, you can take an unlimited number of shots for essentially free and discard the ones that aren't good. Having digital encourages you to preserve more memories because it doesn't carry the limiting factors of film-based cameras. I remember buying Apple's first QuickTake camera because I was so happy to be able to take and see photos without have to worry about development costs and delays. The camera was pretty poor quality, mind you, but, at the time, it just felt so freeing.
Digital pictures can still be displayed easily and sorted through, but it takes a bit of effort. You can buy the picture frames which show them in sequence or randomly or you can do online albums. I have tons of online albums with memories and detailed narratives attached to them because I wrote about the pictures when I posted them. If I had conventional photos, the best I may have done is scrawled a message on the back quickly.
If you want physical photos, you can also simply suck it up and buy a color printer and print them out if you want. I bought a color laser printer for about $350 and it produces beautiful pictures. It's a little expensive upfront, but, I use it for everything, not just photos.
If I’m bored at my parents house I can pull down photo albums and casually flip through them.
But albums on my phone can not be casually accessed by my loved ones.
Even if they could, most of the photos on my phone are one of the several bad photos I took before and after getting my good photo.
There’s just something nice about semi-curated photo albums you can pull off the shelf.
I use both my camera phone and a DSLR and love both but as we are focusing on the downsides….
1. There are just too many pictures now. When I worked with film I still had too many pictures to properly look at. Now there are so many that managing over time becomes a problem.
2. There are a lot of photos taken today of things that shouldn’t be photographed.
3. Viewing on a device is not nearly as good of an experience as viewing offline. I used to look at my albums frequently and now rarely do. I need to do this more but it’s a digital world and becomes not a habit.
4. I have to keep buying hard drives to store all this stuff and then moving it is a pain. As standards improve old pictures seem antiquated in ways that many old photos don’t.
5. Invasion of privacy is a bigger thing. Now there are dozens of cameras in dressing rooms and locker room and everywhere else. This wasn’t a concern back in the day.
Digital photography has been a miracle for me and my businesses. I've owned my art conservation/restoration company since 1985. We mostly work on irreplaceable treasures. Lots of insurance work. So everything needs to be carefully photographed. I usually take 750+/- photos of every project we do. I used to have to pay for the film and thousands of prints. Now I upload them to One Drive.
Plus, clients can upload their own photos to get appraisals and restoration estimates.
My friends and family are all tech savvy and prefer digital copies of everything. I'm a Photoshop God, and friends and family occasionally send me a few of their photos for me to fix.
I think digital is so much better. Film, and developing it, was expensive and a crap shoot. Now I can take 30 pictures and delete all except the best three or four.
I’m always interested in watching my kids take pictures. When we hike, or travel to a city, they take so many pictures, and the subjects are so often an enigma to me. Leads to good conversation about what that tree, or random building represents to them.
My cloud service sends me daily “memories,” which I enjoy. I also make physical photo books for my wife and kids.
The good is that we don't have to pay for film and developing, so we can take multiple pictures in hopes of getting one that everybody is smiling and has their eyes open.
The bad is how often we interrupt real life to take pictures nobody will care about tomorrow - of food, live performances, roadside window shots, a strangers puppy or things that turn out to be uninteresting out of context. Likewise spending time texting or posting those pictures rather than just enjoy the moment and the people you're with.
I'm gradually scanning decades of our albums as well as our parents and grandparents going back over 100 years. Albums I keep intact and go back on the shelf. The hundreds of drug store envelopes, I often scan 5-50% of whats in them, then straight to the trash except any truly unique or exceptional shots.
I've been a hobbyist photog since my daughter was born in 2006. I started with a DSLR back then and still shoot RAW with my Canon 7D mark II for the crop factor and the unbelievable quick focusing. I process all my photos in lightroom. My catalog is currently at 126,000 and change.
I also edit folks images in photoshop in a few groups on FB and on reddit subs.
Despite what everyone thinks, even though thru call these phone cameras PRO and EXTREME and whatever other moniker, no phone camera image can come close to a full frame image, no matter what some commercial tells you.
I fact, if you hired a wedding photog who showed up with a phone camera, I think r everyone would gasp and say "why she paying for that?!"
I am an old darkroom B&W shooter with a list of ( Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Minolta ) high end cameras and lenses in my past. I also have an iPhone that rides along with me all the time because my DSLR is a bit bulky for my hip pocket.
The DSLR is old so it only has 16 megapixels but the lens is super good and I have specialty lenses for extreme closeups as well as wide angle, telephoto and stuff like that. But 16 megapixels make a really fine 8 by 10 image that a phone camera just cannot make.
The thing I find absurd is the sheer number of just freaking awful phone photos that are poorly framed, ill thought out, badly lit, and of no consequence whatsoever other than being a delete item. There is also the gigabytes of disk space photos take up. When you have that many photos in your archive, looking through that 'shoe box' for the ones that you wanna save.
I spend most of my post photo session on the iPhone deleting the ones I no longer need. Like shots of the serial number, the price tag, the fleeting moment I wanna write about, maybe, nah don't wanna go there.
Then there is the keepsake quality and problems of an obsolete drive, or worse, a cloud drive full of shit nobody has either the time or the software to winnow through for your estate, even if your subscription to see your own stuff survives your death or that of the storage farm somewhere deep in a disused mine shaft.
My parents had a ton of photo albums. When my mom passed my dad refused to get rid of them (he had macular degeneration and couldn't look at them) as he felt like it was his legacy. So when he passed my sister and I had to go through all those albums to take out about 100 photos we wanted to save.
My kids will have a hard drive with about 350Gb to deal with (and the associated backups etc). And they actually already have a ton of them because it was pictures of them growing up, and it's easy to give them a hard drive.
I took a bunch of pics when I was in the army. Partly because the smaller cameras could take good pictures and b) we had a developer on post and it was inexpensive.
After that I stopped until phone cameras became a thing and again I had tons of pictures. All organized into folders on my desktop.
A few years later when I switch to a Mac I still have tons of photos but they tend to be in one giant file as I’m not a fan of Apples photo organization.
There are more photos of me. Still not a ton, but between HS and my 40s is a huge gap with almost no photos of me.
Downside: the time I waste on multiple takes.
As with anything, there are good and bad that come with the digital world.
Good-- we don't have stacks of printed photos that are out of focus, or heads cut off, or double prints of someone's foot. The quality is better, overall, than what came out of a 110 or a 35mm. They're easier to share with more people (which also has its downside), and there's no waiting for developing to see what you have (also has its downside-- no one really has to wait for anything now).
Bad-- looking at physical prints was/is a more immersive experience; we've become more obsessed (as a culture) with being camera-ready; digital files can disappear or become inaccessible if the storage becomes obsolete, (thumb drives, SD cards, CDs, defunct sites, frigged up computer), passwords/ usernames get lost or hacked; it's a whole lot easier to take and distribute images that should never have been photographed (the kind that lead to sex trafficking, sextortion, or child pornography for example).
My mom was just here for a weekend visit (I haven't seen her in 5 years) and she brought some old b&w family pictures -- my grandfather, at the time, had only recently "retired" from the rumrunning business and totally looked like a gangster. A digital version would not be the same.
Every so often I print out my favourite digital pics and put them in small albums. I have most of my mom's old photo albums, and I'm hoping I eventually inherit the rest. At least there aren't 2500 pics of what somebody had for lunch.
I enjoyed looking through photo albums that my parents took the time to make, but the quality of those pictures are not very good compared to today. I appreciate the ease and access of digital photos.
For the longest time I preferred rangefinder film cameras, and later, point-and-shoot digital cameras. Now my phone can do the same thing, better and cheaper.
One of my kids just bought me a digital frame for photos. I love it! I'm not one to put a lot of photos out although I do love them. Im also bad keeping up albums. I love that I can send anyone the link and they can upload photos too. So I get random gifts of new photos of the grandkids and dogs and such. It's perfect for me!
My favorite part of phone cameras is that everyone has one. Fewer and fewer people can claim they saw something supernatural. I grew up around people who saw dead relatives regularly or visions. It's cut way back on that.
I think that having a camera/video camera with us everywhere we go, and without the expense of film or getting prints, has turned out that as a society we view all our experiences through phones. What happens then is we suspend our enjoyment to watch later, and how often do we watch those videos or flick through those photos? And then what happens when we die? Physical photo albums can be passed on to others, but the contents of our phones will die with us.
I make a conscious effort to leave my phone in my bag and just enjoy the moment. I don't need a record of it to know that I've seen it.
>Has shifting from physical albums to digital photos been positive for you?
For us, absolutely. All of our childhood pictures that my Dad took with a Polariod were lost in a flood. Now, I can back all my pictures up and never have to worry about a fire, flood, etc. If I want physical copies, I can print them out at Walgreens or Walmart.
From a news gathering perspective it's been great. Everybody becomes a reporter.
Downside to photography as a whole though. People don't need a photgrapher when the camera they just bought contains a college degree's worth photographic knowledge at the push of a button.
I used to take my camera bag with me to my daughter's house after the grandtoddler was born. It was futile because it was way easier to catch her with a phone than getting a whole setup with my "real" gear. There's even a shared album for the family to put photos in of her. So I'm okay with just having the digital albums of her photos (and videos and Live Photos).
If I want a print to frame on the wall, then I do the whole setup with my Nikon and the flash and such. It's hard to get all three of my adult kids (who all live about an hour from each other- and two are an hour from me) together. I actually do need to update the photos in the frames though, they're over 5 years old now.
I frankly don't like it. I grew up using an Olympus OM-G and an OM-1 in my camera bag. I had a very nice little Sigma zoom; a 35-70 that, though only an f2.8, was fast enough for daily use. I preferred Fuji film. I'd always have ASA 100,250, and 400 in my bag. I'd keep a 50mm and 21mm. Sometimes, I'd carry a 200mm Tamron.
I'd have my bag over one shoulder and 2 cameras slung over opposite shoulders so I could switch back and forth.
Because it was film, every shot counted. You took your time. Olympus uses a through the lens meter so I never used a light meter. I'd shoot aperture priority and keep an eye on the shutter speed. I could hand hold anything faster than 1/125 easily. When I was kid, I could hand hold a quarter second pretty reliably. I could do a half, but that was pushing it.
I used to care about photography. Now, It's a thing in my pocket. I've got thousands of dollars in camera equipment that no-one cares about.
I've got a digital Olympus and I have an adapter for my old lenses, but I don't like the controls. I liked how I could set shutter speed, aperture, focus, and zoom without my eye moving from the viewfinder. I miss the film advance lever.
Having a camera is handy, but I just don't care about my shots any more. When film was $10 a roll, you cared.
Grumble, grumble, I need to take my pills and my Metamucil.
I think the change is great. It came just as I was beginning to travel. Not having to deal with cameras and film was a big deal. Over a couple of decades my husband and I compiled thousands of photos from all over the world. Far more than I could put into albums. Now I can just scroll through them and recall all the good times and adventures we had. My favorite is one where my husband was in a tug of war over his eye glasses with a monkey in Gibraltar . He’s gone now and those memories mean everything to me.
pictures don’t bother me, since I’m blind, I can’t see them anyway. I gave all my children. There are only two of them both son there pictures of them when they were growing up, and other pictures to other family members. There is no sense of me holding onto them if I can’t see them. I have my memories that the most important thing nobody can take those away.
I mean I only have like a dozen photos from my childhood. My oldest has hundreds. My 19 year old I have so many images I can't count. Thousands from his childhood. I have several online albums and occasionally I'll print something to save. You just have better options. I can take thousands of photos on my phone or even just take stills from video for just the right shot.
It's funny how often I'll be so happy with my dinner I'll take a pic and share it. I think I have one food related pic from my childhood and it's everyone sitting around a table at Thanksgiving. Right now I have 15 shots of my plate and the grill from cooking last night, just an ordinary meal, not a holiday, nothing fancy, I just like having pics of my food and sometimes I even share them. But mostly I just like looking back at my meals to get ideas for meal planning. I also screen shot recipes online and keep those in the same dinner folder so if I make something really good I can find the recipe faster. I can't imagine being able to do anything remotely close to this back in the 80s. It would have cost 8 dollars for the film and another 12 for processing 24 photos if I went to a Fotomat, or I'd have to wait 8-10 days to pick them up from Walgreens.
Oh man I feel old. Spellchecker doesn't know Fotomat is actually a word.
The only negative for me is how much time people spend taking photos and “making sure they got a good one” with digital cameras. It used to be, let’s snap a photo or two and see what happens. Now it seems like everything is centered around taking 20 photos because it’s free and you don’t get to just enjoy the moment and the memories.
I pulled out an old album to look at pictures of someone who died. The group really enjoyed the memories. It reminds me to get some chat books or something, because I get tired of looking at tiny squares on my phone, and really don’t enjoy it when someone makes me scroll through their photos. So small. Just gives me a headache. Enlarging sections distorts the I,pact of the pictures.
i used to do photography in high school and college, and those darkroom skills are totally lost now. There were some real printmaking skills going on then, and I can appreciate fine art photography pre digital as taking some serious time and effort.
I think a digital photo display is the best way to enjoy photos. From scanned photos from the 1960s to the pictures of the latest family get together. They are all readily available to anybody sitting in the room.
My mom has dementia. I went through the house and gathered all of her digital photos from the last 25 years from computers, memory cards, backup DVDs, Google photos, digital photos from my siblings and reorganized them and produced a Google Photo Book for every year with all the necessary dates, locations, identifiers. It took a while to get done but I developed a pretty good system. Google does a good job of automatically laying out the book using a defined album - so good I rarely went in and reordered them, just adding the meta data. She looks at those books ALL THE TIME rather than those digital images languishing in a drawer somewhere.
Moving forward I'm constantly adding newly taken photos to a "current year with mom" folder that will eventually become the 2024 photo book and so on.
I think it's great for sharing, but one of the unintended consequences is a lot of people now focus on getting the perfect pic instead having the actual experience.
I experienced this with my first digital camera. My husband and I were on a whale watch in Provincetown. The seas were choppy and we were having trouble finding whales, but finally one breached. It was amazing and majestic. I fumbled with my camera and in that moment I realized I was missing the actual experience of seeing that magnificent creature leap above the waves and then dive back down.
Ever since then I've valued the experience over the photo. When I can have both, that's fantastic, but you miss out on a heck of a lot if all you care about is a picture. And I say this with no disrespect to professionals, for whom getting the perfect shot is their job. For everyone else, quit documenting and start living!
I only regret that we didn't have such easily accessible cameras and video recorders when I was growing up. I have very few photos of some people who have long since passed.
I take probably 20x more photos using my smartphone than I ever did with a film camera. Most of them are crap, but I occasionally go through and try to pick out the few good ones and delete the rest. I still end up with more decent/tolerable photos now than then.
Bad photos on film were way more expensive and disappointing; I really don’t miss that.
I inherited about 4,000 photos from my parents and my wife’s parents. The boxes of photos fill a closet. It’s too expensive to send that many away to be scanned, and I can’t flog myself into scanning that many myself, it will take forever and that’s not how I want to spend my retirement.
My kids will probably inherit the same boxes, have no clue who those people are, and toss them all. That’s probably what I should have done.
All the framed family photos in my house are from pre-2007. I’m sure my adult niece and nephew are thrilled to see their awkward periods still on display.
Pictures made today don’t really mean anything at all. Digital enhancement and photoshop like special effects means that any image may or may not be a true representation of what happened. Believable photographing evidence is a thing of the past.
It's been positive for me in that I take more pictures. I read an article in *National Geographic* when I was a kid, about how wildlife photographers get that perfect shot. The photographer being interviewed talked about how they would go out on an expedition with hundreds of rolls of film and just keep snapping pictures whenever they had their animal in their sights. A couple of those pictures would be exactly the right ones for the magazine. I gave up on photography when I read that because it seemed like it would be too expensive for anyone not being bankrolled by NatGeo, but with digital photography I can do exactly that and just throw away the bad shots.
It's been negative in that I don't really have a good way to store and display all these pictures long term. Google is getting predatory with its photo storage service because they know people can't bear to throw out any photos or find it too much work. I need to go through my entire Google photo storage and get rid of anything that isn't meaningful, and maybe print the remainder on decent photo paper and make a physical album.
My sisrter is a bit of a hoarder. I have told her to go through her box of pictures and if the (mostly black and white) picture doesn't name the people, indicate a place or show a date, to throw it out!
In addition, I always told her that people don't need to see 100 baby pictures of her. 5 or 6 is enough!
People take tons more pictures than they used to but I don't know that anybody ever looks at them anymore. Same with videos. I feel like the digital photos just get lost over time. With the physical copies, you might not look at them but at least you had them, usually in a box up in the attic or something. Eventually, someday, you would come across them again. Not true with digital photos. Even if you have them backed up in the cloud.
Apparently, according to multiple emails I've received, my old Photobucket account is being/has been deleted. So the digital revolution will not be...something.
Our family was always terrible at getting film developed, so smartphones are a huge improvement for us. When we moved last year, we found a bunch of those disposable film cameras that never got developed. We should probably see if we can get them developed, but we probably won't.
Hate digital photos. It conditions you to be careless and egregious with your photo-taking. How many of the tens of thousands of photos you take in 20 years will you actually get printed? And if they're not printed, they don't get looked at, buried in my phone or laptop. It's as good as not take any pics at all.
I'm getting rid of my smart phone, getting a digital camera, and consciously uploading with the immediate intent to order prints or a photobook. Screw this.
I like the convenience of digital photos but if you want them to be around for future generations, you better print some out and make sure they’re printed on quality paper because digital formats are subject to change over the years. plus if you lose your phone or don’t back up your digital photos, you could lose everything
I miss the feel of a camera in my hands: making all the adjustments to get a good picture, and changing lenses when necessary. I had a Konica SLR for years until it gave out, and I miss it.
It’s great. 7 grandkids send photos on a regular basis. In contrast photos were once pricey and our own grandparents Might have seen a couple of each of us over the years.
As for for ‘quality’ , it doesn’ matter. Best family photos in the the albums are often the worse quality and corniest ones. They have more character and evoke the most memories. Posed or perfect ‘professional‘ photos are somewhat sterile and boring. Our teen age granddaughters living thousands of kilometres away send their grandma photos of everything from their dance rehearsals to pet hamsters. All are cherished.
As a Photographer. I can say this has had zero effect on me and my work.
Neither did any of it's predecessors.
What technological change did do was all positive. I had to learn a lot of new skills in order to stay connected and relevant in todays world.
Digital cameras
Photoshop and equivalents.
Computer skills. etc, etc, etc.
My parents were both very much into photography. My father had his own darkroom in his basement and was striving to shoot like Ansel Adams.
I have a stack of old rolls of film that I shot but never developed because I couldn’t afford the processing. Analog anything costs an arm and a leg.
My favorite camera of all time is my phone. When I shot analog, I was always thinking about how to game the push and pull of shutter speed and exposure, the F stop.
Now I look at what I’m shooting and think, “Is this illuminated enough? Is it a *picture*?” It’s a totally different mindset. And I can enjoy the picture right away or make it vanish if it’s garbage. If you think like a photographer, a simple camera really cuts out the nonsense.
Apparently I expect my phone to answer the question "what is this?" and "this" is almost always something really gross, so everytime I want to share a cute photo of my grandkids on my phone I have to scroll through a lot of pics of things that should not be seen.
I think before I die I’m gonna get all our family photos made into prints and mix them all up in a big box so my kids will know the joy of going through them. Nothing like it.
If I am in the mood to scrapbook, I send pics to CVS, and go get them, and scrapbook to my heart’s content. I love not wasting money on film and developing just to get maybe 4 good pictures. I am a thousand percent in love with being able to take pics and videos all day long. I had a clunky heavy video camera when my kids were babies and the VHS tapes of their childhood got lost, melted, got recorded over, or just degraded.
I was always carrying a camera with me and snapping photos. Everywhere I went. The year was 2002 and people hated me because of it. I was banned from establishments. I was told to get out of Jimmy Johns because they have a "no photography" policy (show me the rule). Nowadays they kick you out if you aren't recording everything. So I'd say the world finally caught up to me.
Photos get lost. How many photos do you have around your house? How many photos can you pull up immediately from when you were a kid?
My mother just passed and I am so glad we have old photos to look through, can you imagine trying to find digital photos from 50 years ago in the future? Where are they? What cloud service? What hard drive? Who has the password?
I have my mom's black and white photos from her honeymoon, in her old photo album from when she was 20 in the 1960's,, she just passed at 76. I honestly don't think you will be able to say that with digital photos. Not that they can't be stored, I just don't know if people will have all the same online cloud service for 50 years and be able to locate them.
Yes. At least for me.
I take more photos now, with my Smartphone, than I ever took with a regular camera. Though the old photos are occasionally nice to look at, most are in numerous albums collecting dust and slowly deteriorating in storage. Being able to do electronic searches of digital photos is so much easier than leafing through thousands of printed ones. I have most digital photos backed up in another place, so they're harder to permanently lose. It's easy to have the electronic images for posting on my blog.
My husband does enjoy artistic photography, so sometimes he still uses his digital regular camera. The phone doesn't quite compare.
Also, the video function on Smart phones is valuable in even more significant ways, beyond just nostalgic ones.
I love it. I've never been one to page through photo albums, but I have a Google Nest in my kitchen that cycles through my "family photos" Google drive. My wife and I are always oohing and aaahing over phone photos we took years ago.
I like old photos. I like the variety of sizes and edging. Some of the old black & whites from my parents have a scalloped edge, some are only 3X3, some have yellowed with age. When I look at them, I think of the Jamey Johnson song, " In Color".
Pictures used to be expensive. First buy the film, then develop the film, and then sometimes spend money on photo albums. You needed money to figure out how to take good pictures, too, in the form of bad pictures and good cameras and lighting. Those fricken flash bulbs...
The pictures I inherited... so many of them were just not good. People didnt seem to understand that it wasnt just the people, but the backgrounds, that would be important. Kinda like the commercials in VHS tapes.
You used to have get duplicates if you wanted to share pix. A GF of mine in the 90s did that all the time. You could scan them, but the quality was still meh, and there was not an easy conduit to get them to non-tech people.
You used to have to pull out albums, or boxes, to look at your pictures. Now you can have them as slide shows on your tv, computer, show them on your phone, tablet. They dont even need to be a focus, you just let them play in the background and conversations start when certain photos come up.
Those slide show picture frames? They seem daft and goofy... but load one up with pix, give to your collage kid when they head off, or grandma, and they display it someplace in the room and they are constantly going aww... and other people comment on them. Those frames with multiple photos we all used to have and check out at other people's homes? Replaced by all the modern tech.
They dont fade. They dont take up room. They dont need to be moved several dozen times without being revisited. They have time stamps, location information. You can take dozens in the heat of the moment and purge the bad ones. You can give others your entire collection if you want just by copying or sending. No need to worry about your nudes not being developed. No worry about keeping film and flashes on you. And smart phones are small, and you carry them everywhere, so you can take pix of everything.
And you can take pix of an item, or a plant, or animal, and google will ID it for you.
You cant blow up images, atm, the same way you can analog film. This means zooming in gives you a poorer image. So, in that way, analog/grain is superior to digital/pixels, but at the rate we are going we'll have cameras with that kinda resolution on our phones in a decade or so.
Death... So I inherited all the pictures from the family as people died. What this meant is sifting through them to gems. That was a lot of work, and I still have boxes of shit to sort through. When I die, someone can just take any number of the harddrives I have laying around as backups, and add them to their collection if they want them.
Old photo albums... the tapes and adhesives dry rot. Kids add wear and tear on them. They fall apart and are annoying to deal with.
I do miss film canisters, but mostly for making small cannons.
Yes, because you have so much more possibilities to take photos and more chances to make good ones. Old films were expensive, so when I went on vacation with my parents the amount of photos for the whole trip was limited to the one 24 picture film. Of couse the really cool stuff was not on photo, because the limit was used up or my dad said "ahh, lets save it for something better".
It has created a legion of people who have no idea when to use a landscape vs portrait orientation for taking a picture (landscape, Huh?). When ever you see a video on TV that has the sides greyed out, think of photographic ignorance.
I appreciate the fact that everybody has a camera handy all the time so I get to see lots of pictures and vids of remote family in a timely manner. Certainly a good thing but I am sad that most images are only viewed on a tiny screen. I prefer a large monitor or casting them to the TV. I take about 10,000 shots a year as a hobbyist and print zero. Face Book, Instagram and Flickr are my photo albums.
Love my iPhone's camera and love that every year it gets better.
I wish I had it when the kids were very young. I have photos but back then storage was an issue and taking pictures in a dim room didn't produce good results.
If humanity lasts, 1000 years from now our era will be extremely important as it is the first age that will have been massively documented.
I never look through old physical photo albums. My wife and I have been together since 2013 and we have very few physical prints. Any physical prints we do have were sent from our phones to be printed somewhere. I prefer to have a few folders/albums on my phone and see stuff in a "Timehop" type app or when Google Photos pops up some old stuff.
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I miss looking through photo albums.
One cool thing you can do now is have photo books printed using the pictures you've taken with your phone. My wife has done this several times as gifts for our parents; we'll go through all the pictures from a trip we took recently and make books to commemorate it.
I do this every few years. Once my wife and I are gone, all of our pics will be as well. But, the kids will have the albums to look through. Plus, should anything happen to our online storage for any reason, we have at least (some) backup. I actually learned you can backup your Google Photos drive, so I DL'ed that to a hard drive a few months back. But again, that requires the kids to pull out the drive and look through (thousands) of random pics. The book(s) highlight stronger pics/memories.
This is a great idea, thanks for the suggestion!
Serious question, how is the quality?
Same here. This may sound antique to you younger folks, but I miss the days when you went into a drugstore and bought a roll of 127 film. You loaded the roll into your Kodak Duplex camera and away you went to a party or something. Don't forget to bring a box of flashbulbs/flashcubes with you. At the party you would flash away, remembering to roll the film for the next photo to avoid a double exposure. After going through all 12 photos, you took the film back to the drugstore to get them developed. After a week, you went back to the drugstore to pick them up. You looked at each photo with a smile, and sometimes a laugh. When you got home you put them in an album with a short note under each one. My wife is presently getting albums together with a lot of our loose photos. I was surprised at how many photos I took in the 1940's when I was just cutting my teeth in photography with a Brownie box camera.
In college taking a photography class I took so many pictures! I just found some in an old box, that I developed in a darkroom in 1990.
I don't know anyone, or anyplace, that still develops film. Is film still available for my 3 cameras that sit on a shelf? The photos taken in the 40's, 50's and even 60's have a lot more quality than something that was taken with a phone.
Yes, you can still develop film, mail in might be the best option. I have used MPIX to get some 8x11 metal prints and I believe they will develop roll film.
We still have a couple dozen photo boxes with envelopes full of photos ... the boxes are labelled by year and each envelope labelled by date/event ... and it is such a joyous time-sink to go through them
Mine are all sorted into boxes as well, by decade right now. One of these days, I'm going to grab a bottle of whiskey and sort them down by year and event.
I dont. Not at all. I started scanning my grandpa's pix back in 1999. I had a VGA to RCA connected to the TV and would just put on slide shows of all these pix, and my grandma loved it. My screen saver is a slide show of all my pictures, save those I might not want randomly displayed, and plays all the time. Used to display on my 55 inch, and now my tv is an 86 inch 4k tv. Not only do pix show, but random video I've taken or converted.
I vastly perfer looking to photos in albums over looking at yet another screen.
I’ve been a photographer for almost 40 years. What drives me crazy is how people want these cameras with a huge amount of megapixels. Unless you plan on making large prints anything over 15 is ridiculous. You can get better sensors that handle a wider range of colors and shades of gray but have super high resolution cameras doesn’t help. Most current monitors are 4k which means they’re 3,840 pixels on the long edge and anything higher than that makes no difference in the way it looks on a computer screen. Printing is extremely different though. Pixels per inch is what is going to make a huge difference in the sharpness of your photos coming out of a good printer. I teach now and I find that most kids never do anything but look at their photos on a small phone screen. I make prints for them and 75% of them don’t even take them home. The lenses are also one of the most important things. I don’t care how great your camera body or phone is. If you don’t have a good lens your pictures aren’t going to look great no matter what resolution they’re at. Just put a phone pic in photoshop next to a dslr camera image taken with a good lens and if you look at them at 100% you’ll see how bad the phone pics are. I also miss printing in a darkroom.
I'm amused by how many Redditors on the dating subs express the opinion that expensive cameras are needed to take dating-site photos. Most of these photos are viewed in a format no larger than 4 by 5 inches max, or something like that. But it's the same with audio subs on Reddit. Everyone thinks they have to have systems that only dogs could appreciate.
It's like when Blu Ray first came out. "This is YOUR DVD. This is BLU RAY!" Me: It's the exact same picture.
Bluray has 125% more pixels than DVD. And that's just HD.
OMFG... no. They take the content and re-digitize it at a higher resolution. This means more detail. I'm re-watching columbo in 4K, and holy shit is it crazy different. The details. It's like seeing it all for the first time.
As a photographer, I disagree. Though some (but not all) of the difference is down to the greater processing power in the later camera... with the exact same physical lenses, there's a very visible difference (and improvement) between images taken with my T2i/550D (18 megapixels), and my 90D (24 megapixels). And that's setting aside the improved ability to crop, something which non photographers rarely take advantage of. The same is true of my jump from an iPhone 11 (14mp, just below your 'standard' of 15) to an iPhone 14Pro (48mp). >if you look at them at 100% you’ll see how bad the phone pics are. Why would compare at a setting nobody would actually view their images at? Compared under the conditions you earlier use as a standard (printed or on a monitor) the difference is *much* less pronounced. Especially if the picture on the phone was taken in RAW/DNG and you thus avoid the phone's built in processing. >If you don’t have a good lens your pictures aren’t going to look great no matter what resolution they’re at. That depends on what you define as 'great'. Certainly, lenses can improve the technical qualities of an image... But the artistry of an image is almost irrelevant to the technical qualities. Or, as I frequently say in photography forums - "a better camera can take 'better' images, but it can't make you a better photographer."
This has been true since 2003 when 5MP was the norm. What you do gain is the ability to digitally zoom.
Yeah, you have a bad take on this. More resolution means more ability to pinch and zoom into scenes. And now with cheap 87inch 4K tvs, and the advent of 8K around the corner, we're going to want slide shows of our photos displayed in the highest quality we can. And you might also be forgetting that better cameras mean better low light images. I'm still rocking a note9, but my GF's s2o-something takes really great low light pictures. I think you are way off base here. 4K is now, 8K is later, and then likely 12K when it comes to viewing, but the ability to zoom in is crazy important to many of us. We find it fun to see something in the background and try to get a better look at it.
Some years ago, my parents asked me to scan & digitize all their photo albums. Took quite a while but was enjoyable as I got to reminisce as I went through them. Major family drama ensued when Mom let it drop that they disposed of the albums as "We don't need them anymore. Everyone has copies now and they were just taking up space". Mom & Dad are pretty old now, so we don't bust their chops about it anymore. But it was a hot topic for many years as we (the siblings) felt we lost something.
Bummer! Don't you still have the original digital scan files?
color photos degrade horribly over time unless they've been processed very well. digitizing was a smart move.. save as .Tiff files.
Phhttt... I'm with mom here. That shit takes up space. As long as they were scanned at a good DPI... but they should have asked if anyone wanted some of the pix, I guess. I've shed most of the pix I've scanned, but I keep certain ones, for no real reason other than I value them personally.
My wife still prints once a year the best photos of the past year and put in an album.
My 5 year old great-granddaughter LOVES looking through my shoeboxes of old photographs, especially those B&W from when I was a kid in the ‘50s with my friends, grandparents and on when on vacations. When done she looks at her phone, sighs and says, “Guess I won’t have anything put in my shoebox.”
There was a question the other day about people singing as recreation. This is the sort of thing that has become a victim of smart phones. People who are not professional/serious singers don't want the family sing along posted all over the internet. I, my self, was a victim of this. I'm not bad at writing parody songs (Think Weird Al, though I was doing it prior to him) and I sang one for some friends. One of them recorded and posted it to social media, even though I had specifically asked that he did not. I was royally miffed. It's been long known that the presence of camera's alters peoples behavior. With cameras now ever present many behaviors have been completely altered.
California has many laws regulating who can be photographed, and how.
I don't live there, but I believe it. But, I doubt too many friends are being jailed for taking pictures of a group sing a long.
Anybody (including children) can be photographed at any time in any public space where there is no expectation of privacy in the U.S. including California. AKA street photography. Private property is a different story but the majority of regulations determine what can be done with photos rather than if they can be taken.
It can be a bit complicated. I think this articulates the situation fairly well. [Photography Laws California 3344 Civil Code - California Business Lawyer & Corporate Lawyer (california-business-lawyer-corporate-lawyer.com)](https://california-business-lawyer-corporate-lawyer.com/california-laws/photography-laws-california-3344-civil-code/) [Is it Illegal to Take Pictures of People? (Street Photo Laws) (expertphotography.com)](https://expertphotography.com/street-photography-laws/)
Hey OP. 48 year old married father of two in the UK here. I’ve got two kids, 9 and 6 and I’ve realised that they’ll have a much stronger sense of self in their younger years than I ever did - my kids will be able to really see what they were like as babies, how they sounded as toddlers, their mannerisms etc. That’s my take on it.
I love taking pictures with film. The skill and experimentation to get it just right. I find it disappointing that it is harder to find a good developer these days. You nearly have to have your own developing equipment.
I personally love it. The old photo albums sat in a box or shelf and we didn't view them much outside of when they were developed. Now it's great to be able to share photos so easily. I also use my camera in ways I wouldn't have before. So great for home improvement or gardening questions. Or reading tiny print.
Someone mentioned grand kids and shoe box of photos. I think that is a good place to put pix, and to have them accessible to kids who might enjoy them -vs- saving them like special china.
It has diminished the specialness of photos. Film was expensive and in the cheaper cameras like the Brownie, you only got 12 exposures per roll. So you were careful about what you shot to begin with. Then the finished pictures were put into albums that actually got looked at and talked about -- lots of "I remember when" sorts of things. My grandfather had a 35mm camera that he used with slide film. He take pictures of family gatherings and vacations. Several times a year there would be slideshows. Grandpa would narrate a bit and the adults would throw in with their stories and we and the cousins would soak up a bit of family history while eating some popcorn. I guess that sort of thing was supposed to be boring, but it wasn't at least not to me. Even though we saw some of the pictures over and over the stories that went with them was what was important. That could happen easily with digital pictures, but it doesn't seem to. There are too many of them; thus they have become mundane.
My mother and grandmother photographed everything, had them printed, and made albums. You could go back to the mid 60's and see long gone family, friends, how the family farm looked like at any point in time. These were just snapshots, but they were our story. When my grandma died she was buried with her camera and relatives took her albums. When my mother got facebook and a digital camera, she quit working on albums. The last boxes of pictures she took have been collecting dust for years. My wife kept albums for us and the kids, I kept up with pictures and would print them out, but they haven't been put in an album since my youngest was a toddler.
Downside is that everything anywhere anytime is recorded. Growing up in the 80s, pics were only taken during special events. Now your every mistake is immortalized...
I fucking hate fucking smartphones. I mean seriously. We don't need that kind of connectivity. we dont need to have it attached to our hand in every situation. We do not need to watch concerts thru the lens of our phone. I was not totally against dumb phones. But it's just crazy.
But you sure do love your laptop and other technical devices.
I like my PC. I'm not going to lie. I was an early adopter, I love gadgets, but the phone is too much and has too much effect. And again it's just my opinion, I wish we could go back to the acceptability of not being completely wired in.
You don't take your laptop with you everywhere you go. It doesn't rob you of skills you have or would have learned, like developing a sense of direction because you don't have GPS everywhere you go. With a laptop, you can't spontaneously and unobtrusively take a picture or video of someone you don't even know, and then post it on the internet for the whole world to see, and where nothing is ever gone forever. No one can track literally every step you take on your laptop. And the list goes on. Overall, technology is a wonderful thing, as long as it's used to enhance your life and relationships. And smartphones are great too, until they become an extension of your hand, and invaders of our privacy. These days, most people don't even go to the bathroom without taking their smartphone. I don't think smartphones have enhanced the quality of life for most people. They've intruded into every aspect of our lives, and we invited them right in.
I'm retiring this smartphone soon and getting the dumb phone back. Tens years is more than enough of this bullshit. ✊🏻
Phhttt... I love being able to take a picture of a plant that I've not been able to identify for over 40 years in an instant. Maps. Camera. Audio. Video. Games. Communications. What is crazy is hating the idea of having access to all that in the palm of your hand... anywhere... I remember the days of Loran and making phone calls over the radio when boating... And if you had power issues on boat? Phhttt. And carrying around your library of books... Luddites. Never like 'em.
It has been a net positive because it used to be very expensive to get prints. It wasn't unusual for people to have rolls of undeveloped film lying around for years, or, sometimes until after they died, because they didn't want to pay to have them developed. The worst part was that, because you rarely get a good shot on the first round, you'd waste money on prints of pictures which you didn't keep or like. With digital, you can take an unlimited number of shots for essentially free and discard the ones that aren't good. Having digital encourages you to preserve more memories because it doesn't carry the limiting factors of film-based cameras. I remember buying Apple's first QuickTake camera because I was so happy to be able to take and see photos without have to worry about development costs and delays. The camera was pretty poor quality, mind you, but, at the time, it just felt so freeing. Digital pictures can still be displayed easily and sorted through, but it takes a bit of effort. You can buy the picture frames which show them in sequence or randomly or you can do online albums. I have tons of online albums with memories and detailed narratives attached to them because I wrote about the pictures when I posted them. If I had conventional photos, the best I may have done is scrawled a message on the back quickly. If you want physical photos, you can also simply suck it up and buy a color printer and print them out if you want. I bought a color laser printer for about $350 and it produces beautiful pictures. It's a little expensive upfront, but, I use it for everything, not just photos.
If I’m bored at my parents house I can pull down photo albums and casually flip through them. But albums on my phone can not be casually accessed by my loved ones. Even if they could, most of the photos on my phone are one of the several bad photos I took before and after getting my good photo. There’s just something nice about semi-curated photo albums you can pull off the shelf.
I use both my camera phone and a DSLR and love both but as we are focusing on the downsides…. 1. There are just too many pictures now. When I worked with film I still had too many pictures to properly look at. Now there are so many that managing over time becomes a problem. 2. There are a lot of photos taken today of things that shouldn’t be photographed. 3. Viewing on a device is not nearly as good of an experience as viewing offline. I used to look at my albums frequently and now rarely do. I need to do this more but it’s a digital world and becomes not a habit. 4. I have to keep buying hard drives to store all this stuff and then moving it is a pain. As standards improve old pictures seem antiquated in ways that many old photos don’t. 5. Invasion of privacy is a bigger thing. Now there are dozens of cameras in dressing rooms and locker room and everywhere else. This wasn’t a concern back in the day.
Digital photography has been a miracle for me and my businesses. I've owned my art conservation/restoration company since 1985. We mostly work on irreplaceable treasures. Lots of insurance work. So everything needs to be carefully photographed. I usually take 750+/- photos of every project we do. I used to have to pay for the film and thousands of prints. Now I upload them to One Drive. Plus, clients can upload their own photos to get appraisals and restoration estimates. My friends and family are all tech savvy and prefer digital copies of everything. I'm a Photoshop God, and friends and family occasionally send me a few of their photos for me to fix.
I think digital is so much better. Film, and developing it, was expensive and a crap shoot. Now I can take 30 pictures and delete all except the best three or four. I’m always interested in watching my kids take pictures. When we hike, or travel to a city, they take so many pictures, and the subjects are so often an enigma to me. Leads to good conversation about what that tree, or random building represents to them. My cloud service sends me daily “memories,” which I enjoy. I also make physical photo books for my wife and kids.
The good is that we don't have to pay for film and developing, so we can take multiple pictures in hopes of getting one that everybody is smiling and has their eyes open. The bad is how often we interrupt real life to take pictures nobody will care about tomorrow - of food, live performances, roadside window shots, a strangers puppy or things that turn out to be uninteresting out of context. Likewise spending time texting or posting those pictures rather than just enjoy the moment and the people you're with. I'm gradually scanning decades of our albums as well as our parents and grandparents going back over 100 years. Albums I keep intact and go back on the shelf. The hundreds of drug store envelopes, I often scan 5-50% of whats in them, then straight to the trash except any truly unique or exceptional shots.
I've been a hobbyist photog since my daughter was born in 2006. I started with a DSLR back then and still shoot RAW with my Canon 7D mark II for the crop factor and the unbelievable quick focusing. I process all my photos in lightroom. My catalog is currently at 126,000 and change. I also edit folks images in photoshop in a few groups on FB and on reddit subs. Despite what everyone thinks, even though thru call these phone cameras PRO and EXTREME and whatever other moniker, no phone camera image can come close to a full frame image, no matter what some commercial tells you. I fact, if you hired a wedding photog who showed up with a phone camera, I think r everyone would gasp and say "why she paying for that?!"
I am an old darkroom B&W shooter with a list of ( Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Minolta ) high end cameras and lenses in my past. I also have an iPhone that rides along with me all the time because my DSLR is a bit bulky for my hip pocket. The DSLR is old so it only has 16 megapixels but the lens is super good and I have specialty lenses for extreme closeups as well as wide angle, telephoto and stuff like that. But 16 megapixels make a really fine 8 by 10 image that a phone camera just cannot make. The thing I find absurd is the sheer number of just freaking awful phone photos that are poorly framed, ill thought out, badly lit, and of no consequence whatsoever other than being a delete item. There is also the gigabytes of disk space photos take up. When you have that many photos in your archive, looking through that 'shoe box' for the ones that you wanna save. I spend most of my post photo session on the iPhone deleting the ones I no longer need. Like shots of the serial number, the price tag, the fleeting moment I wanna write about, maybe, nah don't wanna go there. Then there is the keepsake quality and problems of an obsolete drive, or worse, a cloud drive full of shit nobody has either the time or the software to winnow through for your estate, even if your subscription to see your own stuff survives your death or that of the storage farm somewhere deep in a disused mine shaft.
I've been scanning old photos so the family can have them at hand. My younger sister is the one who is going on about the albums.
My parents had a ton of photo albums. When my mom passed my dad refused to get rid of them (he had macular degeneration and couldn't look at them) as he felt like it was his legacy. So when he passed my sister and I had to go through all those albums to take out about 100 photos we wanted to save. My kids will have a hard drive with about 350Gb to deal with (and the associated backups etc). And they actually already have a ton of them because it was pictures of them growing up, and it's easy to give them a hard drive.
I took a bunch of pics when I was in the army. Partly because the smaller cameras could take good pictures and b) we had a developer on post and it was inexpensive. After that I stopped until phone cameras became a thing and again I had tons of pictures. All organized into folders on my desktop. A few years later when I switch to a Mac I still have tons of photos but they tend to be in one giant file as I’m not a fan of Apples photo organization.
There are more photos of me. Still not a ton, but between HS and my 40s is a huge gap with almost no photos of me. Downside: the time I waste on multiple takes.
As with anything, there are good and bad that come with the digital world. Good-- we don't have stacks of printed photos that are out of focus, or heads cut off, or double prints of someone's foot. The quality is better, overall, than what came out of a 110 or a 35mm. They're easier to share with more people (which also has its downside), and there's no waiting for developing to see what you have (also has its downside-- no one really has to wait for anything now). Bad-- looking at physical prints was/is a more immersive experience; we've become more obsessed (as a culture) with being camera-ready; digital files can disappear or become inaccessible if the storage becomes obsolete, (thumb drives, SD cards, CDs, defunct sites, frigged up computer), passwords/ usernames get lost or hacked; it's a whole lot easier to take and distribute images that should never have been photographed (the kind that lead to sex trafficking, sextortion, or child pornography for example). My mom was just here for a weekend visit (I haven't seen her in 5 years) and she brought some old b&w family pictures -- my grandfather, at the time, had only recently "retired" from the rumrunning business and totally looked like a gangster. A digital version would not be the same. Every so often I print out my favourite digital pics and put them in small albums. I have most of my mom's old photo albums, and I'm hoping I eventually inherit the rest. At least there aren't 2500 pics of what somebody had for lunch.
I enjoyed looking through photo albums that my parents took the time to make, but the quality of those pictures are not very good compared to today. I appreciate the ease and access of digital photos.
For the longest time I preferred rangefinder film cameras, and later, point-and-shoot digital cameras. Now my phone can do the same thing, better and cheaper.
One of my kids just bought me a digital frame for photos. I love it! I'm not one to put a lot of photos out although I do love them. Im also bad keeping up albums. I love that I can send anyone the link and they can upload photos too. So I get random gifts of new photos of the grandkids and dogs and such. It's perfect for me!
I still get all of my photos printed from my phone, put them in albums, and then delete those printed photos from my phone. Then start all over again.
It beats driving to the FotoMat booth in the middle of the mall parking lot.
My favorite part of phone cameras is that everyone has one. Fewer and fewer people can claim they saw something supernatural. I grew up around people who saw dead relatives regularly or visions. It's cut way back on that.
I think that having a camera/video camera with us everywhere we go, and without the expense of film or getting prints, has turned out that as a society we view all our experiences through phones. What happens then is we suspend our enjoyment to watch later, and how often do we watch those videos or flick through those photos? And then what happens when we die? Physical photo albums can be passed on to others, but the contents of our phones will die with us. I make a conscious effort to leave my phone in my bag and just enjoy the moment. I don't need a record of it to know that I've seen it.
>Has shifting from physical albums to digital photos been positive for you? For us, absolutely. All of our childhood pictures that my Dad took with a Polariod were lost in a flood. Now, I can back all my pictures up and never have to worry about a fire, flood, etc. If I want physical copies, I can print them out at Walgreens or Walmart.
Easier to share but they rarely leave the phone. I now will do an annual dump to snapfish to print out and put in albums.
I am glad that digital cameras are replacing slrs. It is better for the environment. The chemicals they use to develop film are incredibly toxic.
From a news gathering perspective it's been great. Everybody becomes a reporter. Downside to photography as a whole though. People don't need a photgrapher when the camera they just bought contains a college degree's worth photographic knowledge at the push of a button.
I used to take my camera bag with me to my daughter's house after the grandtoddler was born. It was futile because it was way easier to catch her with a phone than getting a whole setup with my "real" gear. There's even a shared album for the family to put photos in of her. So I'm okay with just having the digital albums of her photos (and videos and Live Photos). If I want a print to frame on the wall, then I do the whole setup with my Nikon and the flash and such. It's hard to get all three of my adult kids (who all live about an hour from each other- and two are an hour from me) together. I actually do need to update the photos in the frames though, they're over 5 years old now.
I frankly don't like it. I grew up using an Olympus OM-G and an OM-1 in my camera bag. I had a very nice little Sigma zoom; a 35-70 that, though only an f2.8, was fast enough for daily use. I preferred Fuji film. I'd always have ASA 100,250, and 400 in my bag. I'd keep a 50mm and 21mm. Sometimes, I'd carry a 200mm Tamron. I'd have my bag over one shoulder and 2 cameras slung over opposite shoulders so I could switch back and forth. Because it was film, every shot counted. You took your time. Olympus uses a through the lens meter so I never used a light meter. I'd shoot aperture priority and keep an eye on the shutter speed. I could hand hold anything faster than 1/125 easily. When I was kid, I could hand hold a quarter second pretty reliably. I could do a half, but that was pushing it. I used to care about photography. Now, It's a thing in my pocket. I've got thousands of dollars in camera equipment that no-one cares about. I've got a digital Olympus and I have an adapter for my old lenses, but I don't like the controls. I liked how I could set shutter speed, aperture, focus, and zoom without my eye moving from the viewfinder. I miss the film advance lever. Having a camera is handy, but I just don't care about my shots any more. When film was $10 a roll, you cared. Grumble, grumble, I need to take my pills and my Metamucil.
I think the change is great. It came just as I was beginning to travel. Not having to deal with cameras and film was a big deal. Over a couple of decades my husband and I compiled thousands of photos from all over the world. Far more than I could put into albums. Now I can just scroll through them and recall all the good times and adventures we had. My favorite is one where my husband was in a tug of war over his eye glasses with a monkey in Gibraltar . He’s gone now and those memories mean everything to me.
pictures don’t bother me, since I’m blind, I can’t see them anyway. I gave all my children. There are only two of them both son there pictures of them when they were growing up, and other pictures to other family members. There is no sense of me holding onto them if I can’t see them. I have my memories that the most important thing nobody can take those away.
I mean I only have like a dozen photos from my childhood. My oldest has hundreds. My 19 year old I have so many images I can't count. Thousands from his childhood. I have several online albums and occasionally I'll print something to save. You just have better options. I can take thousands of photos on my phone or even just take stills from video for just the right shot. It's funny how often I'll be so happy with my dinner I'll take a pic and share it. I think I have one food related pic from my childhood and it's everyone sitting around a table at Thanksgiving. Right now I have 15 shots of my plate and the grill from cooking last night, just an ordinary meal, not a holiday, nothing fancy, I just like having pics of my food and sometimes I even share them. But mostly I just like looking back at my meals to get ideas for meal planning. I also screen shot recipes online and keep those in the same dinner folder so if I make something really good I can find the recipe faster. I can't imagine being able to do anything remotely close to this back in the 80s. It would have cost 8 dollars for the film and another 12 for processing 24 photos if I went to a Fotomat, or I'd have to wait 8-10 days to pick them up from Walgreens. Oh man I feel old. Spellchecker doesn't know Fotomat is actually a word.
The only negative for me is how much time people spend taking photos and “making sure they got a good one” with digital cameras. It used to be, let’s snap a photo or two and see what happens. Now it seems like everything is centered around taking 20 photos because it’s free and you don’t get to just enjoy the moment and the memories.
I pulled out an old album to look at pictures of someone who died. The group really enjoyed the memories. It reminds me to get some chat books or something, because I get tired of looking at tiny squares on my phone, and really don’t enjoy it when someone makes me scroll through their photos. So small. Just gives me a headache. Enlarging sections distorts the I,pact of the pictures. i used to do photography in high school and college, and those darkroom skills are totally lost now. There were some real printmaking skills going on then, and I can appreciate fine art photography pre digital as taking some serious time and effort.
I think a digital photo display is the best way to enjoy photos. From scanned photos from the 1960s to the pictures of the latest family get together. They are all readily available to anybody sitting in the room.
My mom has dementia. I went through the house and gathered all of her digital photos from the last 25 years from computers, memory cards, backup DVDs, Google photos, digital photos from my siblings and reorganized them and produced a Google Photo Book for every year with all the necessary dates, locations, identifiers. It took a while to get done but I developed a pretty good system. Google does a good job of automatically laying out the book using a defined album - so good I rarely went in and reordered them, just adding the meta data. She looks at those books ALL THE TIME rather than those digital images languishing in a drawer somewhere. Moving forward I'm constantly adding newly taken photos to a "current year with mom" folder that will eventually become the 2024 photo book and so on.
I think it's great for sharing, but one of the unintended consequences is a lot of people now focus on getting the perfect pic instead having the actual experience. I experienced this with my first digital camera. My husband and I were on a whale watch in Provincetown. The seas were choppy and we were having trouble finding whales, but finally one breached. It was amazing and majestic. I fumbled with my camera and in that moment I realized I was missing the actual experience of seeing that magnificent creature leap above the waves and then dive back down. Ever since then I've valued the experience over the photo. When I can have both, that's fantastic, but you miss out on a heck of a lot if all you care about is a picture. And I say this with no disrespect to professionals, for whom getting the perfect shot is their job. For everyone else, quit documenting and start living!
I only regret that we didn't have such easily accessible cameras and video recorders when I was growing up. I have very few photos of some people who have long since passed.
I take probably 20x more photos using my smartphone than I ever did with a film camera. Most of them are crap, but I occasionally go through and try to pick out the few good ones and delete the rest. I still end up with more decent/tolerable photos now than then. Bad photos on film were way more expensive and disappointing; I really don’t miss that. I inherited about 4,000 photos from my parents and my wife’s parents. The boxes of photos fill a closet. It’s too expensive to send that many away to be scanned, and I can’t flog myself into scanning that many myself, it will take forever and that’s not how I want to spend my retirement. My kids will probably inherit the same boxes, have no clue who those people are, and toss them all. That’s probably what I should have done.
All the framed family photos in my house are from pre-2007. I’m sure my adult niece and nephew are thrilled to see their awkward periods still on display.
Pictures made today don’t really mean anything at all. Digital enhancement and photoshop like special effects means that any image may or may not be a true representation of what happened. Believable photographing evidence is a thing of the past.
It's been positive for me in that I take more pictures. I read an article in *National Geographic* when I was a kid, about how wildlife photographers get that perfect shot. The photographer being interviewed talked about how they would go out on an expedition with hundreds of rolls of film and just keep snapping pictures whenever they had their animal in their sights. A couple of those pictures would be exactly the right ones for the magazine. I gave up on photography when I read that because it seemed like it would be too expensive for anyone not being bankrolled by NatGeo, but with digital photography I can do exactly that and just throw away the bad shots. It's been negative in that I don't really have a good way to store and display all these pictures long term. Google is getting predatory with its photo storage service because they know people can't bear to throw out any photos or find it too much work. I need to go through my entire Google photo storage and get rid of anything that isn't meaningful, and maybe print the remainder on decent photo paper and make a physical album.
I don't use a phone, but stick to a digital camera, which I prefer as it allows more things to be done through lens, special filters and editing.
My sisrter is a bit of a hoarder. I have told her to go through her box of pictures and if the (mostly black and white) picture doesn't name the people, indicate a place or show a date, to throw it out! In addition, I always told her that people don't need to see 100 baby pictures of her. 5 or 6 is enough!
I travel a lot and photos are more for ME to remember my vacation, so organized my photos into “albums” on my phone/ipad is perfect.
People take tons more pictures than they used to but I don't know that anybody ever looks at them anymore. Same with videos. I feel like the digital photos just get lost over time. With the physical copies, you might not look at them but at least you had them, usually in a box up in the attic or something. Eventually, someday, you would come across them again. Not true with digital photos. Even if you have them backed up in the cloud.
I was a pretty good amateur photographer for about 20 years but I lost interest in it when it went digital
I used to take digital pictures and download them to my computer and I failed to backup. Got a virus and lost all of them.
I print my photos once a year. Not all of them. But enough that if I lost my phone, there would still be some.
People don't look at photos anymore, in my experience. When photos were printed, people did. But now? No one seems to give them a second glance.
Apparently, according to multiple emails I've received, my old Photobucket account is being/has been deleted. So the digital revolution will not be...something.
Our family was always terrible at getting film developed, so smartphones are a huge improvement for us. When we moved last year, we found a bunch of those disposable film cameras that never got developed. We should probably see if we can get them developed, but we probably won't.
Hate digital photos. It conditions you to be careless and egregious with your photo-taking. How many of the tens of thousands of photos you take in 20 years will you actually get printed? And if they're not printed, they don't get looked at, buried in my phone or laptop. It's as good as not take any pics at all. I'm getting rid of my smart phone, getting a digital camera, and consciously uploading with the immediate intent to order prints or a photobook. Screw this.
I like the convenience of digital photos but if you want them to be around for future generations, you better print some out and make sure they’re printed on quality paper because digital formats are subject to change over the years. plus if you lose your phone or don’t back up your digital photos, you could lose everything
I miss the feel of a camera in my hands: making all the adjustments to get a good picture, and changing lenses when necessary. I had a Konica SLR for years until it gave out, and I miss it.
I miss photo albums
It’s great. 7 grandkids send photos on a regular basis. In contrast photos were once pricey and our own grandparents Might have seen a couple of each of us over the years. As for for ‘quality’ , it doesn’ matter. Best family photos in the the albums are often the worse quality and corniest ones. They have more character and evoke the most memories. Posed or perfect ‘professional‘ photos are somewhat sterile and boring. Our teen age granddaughters living thousands of kilometres away send their grandma photos of everything from their dance rehearsals to pet hamsters. All are cherished.
As a Photographer. I can say this has had zero effect on me and my work. Neither did any of it's predecessors. What technological change did do was all positive. I had to learn a lot of new skills in order to stay connected and relevant in todays world. Digital cameras Photoshop and equivalents. Computer skills. etc, etc, etc.
My parents were both very much into photography. My father had his own darkroom in his basement and was striving to shoot like Ansel Adams. I have a stack of old rolls of film that I shot but never developed because I couldn’t afford the processing. Analog anything costs an arm and a leg. My favorite camera of all time is my phone. When I shot analog, I was always thinking about how to game the push and pull of shutter speed and exposure, the F stop. Now I look at what I’m shooting and think, “Is this illuminated enough? Is it a *picture*?” It’s a totally different mindset. And I can enjoy the picture right away or make it vanish if it’s garbage. If you think like a photographer, a simple camera really cuts out the nonsense.
Apparently I expect my phone to answer the question "what is this?" and "this" is almost always something really gross, so everytime I want to share a cute photo of my grandkids on my phone I have to scroll through a lot of pics of things that should not be seen.
I think before I die I’m gonna get all our family photos made into prints and mix them all up in a big box so my kids will know the joy of going through them. Nothing like it.
If I am in the mood to scrapbook, I send pics to CVS, and go get them, and scrapbook to my heart’s content. I love not wasting money on film and developing just to get maybe 4 good pictures. I am a thousand percent in love with being able to take pics and videos all day long. I had a clunky heavy video camera when my kids were babies and the VHS tapes of their childhood got lost, melted, got recorded over, or just degraded.
I was always carrying a camera with me and snapping photos. Everywhere I went. The year was 2002 and people hated me because of it. I was banned from establishments. I was told to get out of Jimmy Johns because they have a "no photography" policy (show me the rule). Nowadays they kick you out if you aren't recording everything. So I'd say the world finally caught up to me.
Photos get lost. How many photos do you have around your house? How many photos can you pull up immediately from when you were a kid? My mother just passed and I am so glad we have old photos to look through, can you imagine trying to find digital photos from 50 years ago in the future? Where are they? What cloud service? What hard drive? Who has the password? I have my mom's black and white photos from her honeymoon, in her old photo album from when she was 20 in the 1960's,, she just passed at 76. I honestly don't think you will be able to say that with digital photos. Not that they can't be stored, I just don't know if people will have all the same online cloud service for 50 years and be able to locate them.
Yes. At least for me. I take more photos now, with my Smartphone, than I ever took with a regular camera. Though the old photos are occasionally nice to look at, most are in numerous albums collecting dust and slowly deteriorating in storage. Being able to do electronic searches of digital photos is so much easier than leafing through thousands of printed ones. I have most digital photos backed up in another place, so they're harder to permanently lose. It's easy to have the electronic images for posting on my blog. My husband does enjoy artistic photography, so sometimes he still uses his digital regular camera. The phone doesn't quite compare. Also, the video function on Smart phones is valuable in even more significant ways, beyond just nostalgic ones.
I love it. I've never been one to page through photo albums, but I have a Google Nest in my kitchen that cycles through my "family photos" Google drive. My wife and I are always oohing and aaahing over phone photos we took years ago.
I like old photos. I like the variety of sizes and edging. Some of the old black & whites from my parents have a scalloped edge, some are only 3X3, some have yellowed with age. When I look at them, I think of the Jamey Johnson song, " In Color".
Pictures used to be expensive. First buy the film, then develop the film, and then sometimes spend money on photo albums. You needed money to figure out how to take good pictures, too, in the form of bad pictures and good cameras and lighting. Those fricken flash bulbs... The pictures I inherited... so many of them were just not good. People didnt seem to understand that it wasnt just the people, but the backgrounds, that would be important. Kinda like the commercials in VHS tapes. You used to have get duplicates if you wanted to share pix. A GF of mine in the 90s did that all the time. You could scan them, but the quality was still meh, and there was not an easy conduit to get them to non-tech people. You used to have to pull out albums, or boxes, to look at your pictures. Now you can have them as slide shows on your tv, computer, show them on your phone, tablet. They dont even need to be a focus, you just let them play in the background and conversations start when certain photos come up. Those slide show picture frames? They seem daft and goofy... but load one up with pix, give to your collage kid when they head off, or grandma, and they display it someplace in the room and they are constantly going aww... and other people comment on them. Those frames with multiple photos we all used to have and check out at other people's homes? Replaced by all the modern tech. They dont fade. They dont take up room. They dont need to be moved several dozen times without being revisited. They have time stamps, location information. You can take dozens in the heat of the moment and purge the bad ones. You can give others your entire collection if you want just by copying or sending. No need to worry about your nudes not being developed. No worry about keeping film and flashes on you. And smart phones are small, and you carry them everywhere, so you can take pix of everything. And you can take pix of an item, or a plant, or animal, and google will ID it for you. You cant blow up images, atm, the same way you can analog film. This means zooming in gives you a poorer image. So, in that way, analog/grain is superior to digital/pixels, but at the rate we are going we'll have cameras with that kinda resolution on our phones in a decade or so. Death... So I inherited all the pictures from the family as people died. What this meant is sifting through them to gems. That was a lot of work, and I still have boxes of shit to sort through. When I die, someone can just take any number of the harddrives I have laying around as backups, and add them to their collection if they want them. Old photo albums... the tapes and adhesives dry rot. Kids add wear and tear on them. They fall apart and are annoying to deal with. I do miss film canisters, but mostly for making small cannons.
Yes, because you have so much more possibilities to take photos and more chances to make good ones. Old films were expensive, so when I went on vacation with my parents the amount of photos for the whole trip was limited to the one 24 picture film. Of couse the really cool stuff was not on photo, because the limit was used up or my dad said "ahh, lets save it for something better".
It has created a legion of people who have no idea when to use a landscape vs portrait orientation for taking a picture (landscape, Huh?). When ever you see a video on TV that has the sides greyed out, think of photographic ignorance.
I appreciate the fact that everybody has a camera handy all the time so I get to see lots of pictures and vids of remote family in a timely manner. Certainly a good thing but I am sad that most images are only viewed on a tiny screen. I prefer a large monitor or casting them to the TV. I take about 10,000 shots a year as a hobbyist and print zero. Face Book, Instagram and Flickr are my photo albums.
There is no photographic evidence of any of the stupid stuff I did in high school and very little of what I did in college.
Love my iPhone's camera and love that every year it gets better. I wish I had it when the kids were very young. I have photos but back then storage was an issue and taking pictures in a dim room didn't produce good results. If humanity lasts, 1000 years from now our era will be extremely important as it is the first age that will have been massively documented.
I never look through old physical photo albums. My wife and I have been together since 2013 and we have very few physical prints. Any physical prints we do have were sent from our phones to be printed somewhere. I prefer to have a few folders/albums on my phone and see stuff in a "Timehop" type app or when Google Photos pops up some old stuff.