I once read a quote by a well-known professional photographer that stuck with me. He said, “A picture is not a photograph until it’s printed.” In the world of digital-downloading-immediate-satisfaction kind of shooting, it’s easy to take a picture, or 100, download them and forget about them.
What happens? How do we manage to take so many photos but never really do anything with them?
I can raise my hand and say guilty! I hate it, but I tend to do this very thing.
I take a lot of photos. And by a lot, I mean hundreds. Thousands. We have large hard drives, needless to say. And it saddens me. It pains me that I can’t print, print, print away. Why not? What is the culprit behind this last step to send the files to print?
Welp, there is time to do this. And there is money that needs to go towards printing. Two hurdles that seem to stand in my way.
However, once you set up a system to be sure you get prints from those amazing shots, there is nothing like seeing those photographs on the wall.
I admit I am still in the process of creating a system for printing, but I have started sorting through my photos a little differently. By this, I mean I set up a folder labeled “favorites” and, whenever I see an image that I absolutely love, I drop it in there. Having this favorites folder eliminates some time for me later, when I am ready to print some photos from our massive collection. I still have a ways to go with organizing and labeling, but this simple step is a start.
This month I carved out an evening, sat down and sent some of our images out to be printed. After months of thinking about this, I can’t tell you how good it felt to follow through and check this off my list. And also when they arrived in the mail it was like those days when I was eagerly waiting for my prints to be developed! Oh joy!
Our photos are wonderful, beautiful memories that I can see daily now, and I. LOVE. THAT.
Perhaps you suffer from the same thing I do? Procrastination from printing? Just sit down and do it! You will not regret getting prints. Unless you use a crappy photo lab. (Please don’t. We can recommend a professional lab!)
