Friday, May 7, 2021

The Book of Marlee

Christmas, 2008. Four-year-old Marlee samples her grandmother's cake icing.

Canon EOS 5D Classic, Canon 24-85 f3.5-4.5 EF lens


Blog Note: This post is one of a series on documenting your family. More to come.

For many years our sons and their families came to the farm for extended stays at Christmas and New Years. Those were great times. One of the primary reasons we bought the farm property and built the house we did was to create a place where our children and grandchildren would love to come. 

In those days we had a number of small albums of 4x6 prints scattered around the house. At Christmas, 2011, seven-year-old Marlee, our youngest granddaughter, wandered around the house looking through the albums. Finally, she said to Louise:  "Where Are My Pictures, Grandma?"

"I'm afraid they're in Grandpa's camera, sweetheart," answered her grandmother. And so they were. 

I made prints for 35 years, because that was mostly what people had to do if they wanted to see their photographs made on film. (Slides were an exception, but most people didn't shoot slides.) Unfortunately, I got out of the habit of making prints when I switched to digital photography in 2003. I did occasionally make prints, but not many. Marlee was born in 2004, so although I took many pictures of her, they were indeed "in Grandpa's camera."

Spurred by this, I undertook to go through all my pictures of Marlee. I also raided Kim's and Don's cell-phones for a few pictures I didn't have, edited them all down to 150, and ordered 4x6 prints which I put in an album labeled "The Book of Marlee: the First Eight Years," and gave it to her on her eighth birthday. She was thrilled, and her mother told me that for years after that she would sometimes take out her album and look through it.

If I were doing this now, I might, instead of ordering prints, have the photos printed in a booklet such as those offered by Blurb, Shutterfly, and others. You can even get them from WalMart and Amazon. More on this later. 

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, film photography, digital photography, cameras, Dave Jenkins, David B. Jenkins,  family photography, prints, albums, Blurb, Shutterfly

 

2 comments:

  1. Great thing to do, Dave. With the advent of digital, many youngsters only know the photos by looking through their phones. I have done a book of photographs of my wife that were taken since 1970 and made two copies, one for each of our living children, on blurb.com. I have not done a book of images of the entire family and need to look into that. Thanks for the idea! It will require some additional scanning (I think) but would be will worth the effort to leave for the kids!

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  2. Thanks for your comment, Seagrove. Sounds like you're already ahead of me! Over the next months I plan to go through my boxes of slides and negatives and edit out a selection to create a Blurb book of our family from 1965 to the present, which I will give to my children and adult grandchildren. I've already done a great deal of this, but have gaps that need to be filled in.

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