I started printing my photos a few years ago. Before that, I just loved taking the pictures and sharing them on Facebook and Flickr.
It was about communication: a way of telling people what I was thinking about, and also, I way of sharing my story, my
By then I had no computer so I was using my parents’ one. Then I bought mine and with a pendrive, I moved my pictures… but later I changed my old PC for a new one. So I moved the pictures again to an external drive. Then I moved to a new city, and by then I had stored pictures on my phone, my external drive, on a pendrive and on my computer.
Oh and also, on my boyfriend’s computer!
I started losing pictures, not remembering where the important ones were, and talking with friends I was hearing a lot of “yeah, I lost those pictures”, “no, I don’t have those images anymore” or “I just have them on Facebook“.
With all that information, it still took me years to start printing my photos. I’ll be honest, it’s one of those things I always leave for the last moment. Even when I love the feeling of unboxing my photos when they arrive, even when I love so much to touch them, to smell them, to see my little toddler’s hands on them… it’s just something I can do later.
But when it’s about my clients’ images… well, I have to offer prints and I insist a lot on this issue. I hear a lot of “I just want the digitals, I’ll print them later” but within the time I realized that all those images end up lost in a computer, because, let’s be honest, it is what happens every time (with just a tiny number of exceptions).
For example, last month a woman I photographed while she was pregnant with her first child wrote me through Instagram asking for the photos I took her 3 years ago (in a different continent!) because she lost them and now she wanted to print them.
So to offer prints it’s not only a service I provide: it’s about principles. I believe in paper photos.
Becaus even if not losing the pictures is the main reason to print them, that’s not the only one.
To touch the images, to hang them in your walls and contemplate them, to take the time to choose the most important ones, the ones that draw a smile on your face, the more representatives of the lived and shared moment, the ones that tell who you are. To enjoy them with your family, to talk about them, to laugh and relive the moments together… to have your photos on paper is full-conscious experience.
It’s the best way of passing them through generations. Of building your family story, your kids’ story… your story in photos.