Making It Happen

My great granddaughter Lydia at our creek,

Deer Run Farm, McLemore Cove, 2018

Fuji X-Pro1, Fujinon 27mm f2.8 lens

 

Blog Note: This post is one of a series on documenting your family. More to come. I apologize for the irregularity of my posts lately. In addition to the other difficulties I've mentioned recently, I've been having internet problems. I hope they're now ironed out, but we'll see.

I've been rather unfocused, if you'll excuse the expression, in this series of posts about documenting your family. So this post should probably have been the first in the series. 

I've spent my life in photography, as the title of this blog affirms. I've had the privilege of traveling to 33 or 34 countries and around much of the U.S. with my cameras and have photographed people and things in many different places. But whether my camera was pointed at barns or Bulgarians, most of the  photography I've done has been documentary.

I greatly enjoyed traveling and photographing all those people, places, and things, but the most important photography I've done was right at home, documenting the life of my family as we lived it. 

You can do the same, and you don't have to be a professional photojournalist. If you have a camera, even a simple digital point-and-shoot or a cell phone, you can make photos to preserve moments in your family's history that you will treasure in years to come, and more importantly, generations yet to come will treasure them even more. But you have to make it happen. 

How can you make a photo-history of your family happen? The most important factor is you. You have to choose to make it happen, because it won't just happen by itself.

1. Carry a camera -- and watch for opportunities to use it. I carry a real camera, because I like cameras. I like to handle and use them. But a cell phone will do the job. My daughter-in-law Kim provides us with a daily, running documentation of her family with her cell phone camera. My late sister Anah kept Kodak in business with her little Olympus point-and-shoot as her family was growing up. (Double prints of everything!) 

2. Get those photos out of your camera or cell phone and into your computer. If you don't, they will sooner or later be accidentally erased. Saving them to the cloud is good, but that's not really doing anything with them. Get them into your computer and sort through them (that's called editing).

3. Make prints. Select the ones you like best and/or consider most significant and send them out to one of the many on-line services and have prints made. Put them in albums. Remember, until a digital file is printed it's only a collection of electrical impulses. A print is tangible. You can hold it in your hands. You can show it to others (much better than asking them to look at the screen of your cell phone or the back of your camera.) 

Photograph and text copyright 2021, David B. Jenkins

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday each week.

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone 

Tags: photography, Dave Jenkins, David B. Jenkins, cameras, Fuji X-Pro1, Fujinon 27mm f2.8 lens, Kodak Olympus cameras