Louise and Donny at Bahia Honda State Park, Florida, May, 1969.
Photography has many functions. I made a living with my cameras for many years, and that was a truly important function. But for me, and probably for most of us, the camera's most important function is to serve as a memory-making machine.
In May, 1969, near the end of our first year teaching at Miami's Florida Christian School, Louise and I took the graduating seniors on an overnight outing to Bahia Honda State Park in the Keys. (We were class sponsors.)
Louise, Rob, 11-month-old Donny, and I had our little Ted Williams pop-up camper (I wrote about it here), while the students had tents and sleeping bags. As the saying goes, "A great time was had by all."
The camera I took with me on that trip was a Petri rangefinder with an f2.8 lens, very similar to this one. It was not new when I bought it, and I didn't pay much for it. But I made a lot of pictures with that camera, almost all of them on color negative (print) film. The prints are not the sharpest, but the memories they bring back are sharp indeed. I still have most of those prints, and I've also scanned them with an Epson Perfection 4990 flatbed scanner and stored them in my computer. Best of both worlds!
I simply can't overemphasize the importance of making prints and backing up your photos in your computer. Many of my readers, if not most, are making family snapshots with their cell phones. And that's great! Cell phone photography is quick, convenient, and entirely suitable for family snaps. But they also can vanish into the ether very easily if we don't take care to back them up. So choose the ones that mean most to you and email them off to Shutterfly or some other printing service. It's quick, easy, and cheap. You will never regret it.
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Photography and text copyright 2025 David B.Jenkins.
I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.
I stopped having prints made 15 years ago. Storing them was becoming problematic in the small house I owned then. I keep negatives, which is its own storage problem. Fortunately our new home is considerably larger, which eases this issue somewhat.
ReplyDeleteWhat I've decided to do is, over time, make a limited number of prints. For family photos, just key ones. For my hobby work, just the best of it.
When my parents had both passed the family photos came to me. I'm grateful to have them, and it brought back incredible memories looking back through them. But it was boxes and boxes and boxes of them, and frankly well more than half of them were just not very good or were repetitive. At some point I might cull the collection.
You and I and people like us have made plenty of prints, even to the point of having to do something to avoid being overwhelmed with them. I'm writing for the great majority who treat the whole thing casually and wind up with no visual history to pass on to their children and grandchildren.
DeleteI have several large boxes of prints still to be gone through. If I live long enough, I'll sort out the true keepers and discard the rest. It's a slow process, and I have plenty of other things that take priority. Maybe my kids will sort through the mess!
Sorry. I carelessly posted the above reply as "Anonymous." My Google account doesn't seem to be working.
DeleteDave