Hard Copies with Heart: Why Printed Photos Matter
So many things in our day-to-day lives are digital. We communicate over text and social media, we shop online, a lot of us work online…and yes, online platforms are great for sharing photos with your loved ones and for storing backups of your images. But as a photographer who creates portraits of beautiful families and special milestones in life that can’t be re-created, I firmly believe in the value of good, old-fashioned, printed portraits too. Here’s why.
Technology-Proof Format
Time marches on and so does technology, so any type of media we have today could be obsolete before we know it. If that’s the only place you have your treasured photos stored, it will be heartbreaking someday to go look for those photos only to find that you can’t get to them or that they don’t look the way you remembered. For example, I can’t enjoy my graduation pictures anymore because they’re from the early days of Facebook so now they’re pixelated and blurry. Quality printed photos, though, will stay crisp and beautiful no matter how much time passes.
No Need to Keep Changing the Storage
As technology and storage formats change, you probably won’t be able to keep your digital photos in the same place or the same format. You might have to continuously upgrade them to newer and newer formats to make sure you can still access them as older formats fall to the side.
Think about music for example, and think about how many different music formats there have been in your lifetime. Maybe you grew up with radios and cassettes, so you had your favorite songs stored on tapes. Then CDs came along and people stopped using cassettes so you had to transfer your music to CDs. Today you’d have a hard time finding a car with a CD player and most computers don’t even have them anymore - it’s all digital files and auxiliary cables or streaming. The same thing happens with images and digital storage, so to enjoy your portraits in 30 years, you might have to transfer them time and time again and hope that they retain their quality and that the files don’t get corrupted in the process.
Printed portraits, on the other hand, are simply there for you to see whenever you want.
Decorating Your Home with Joy and Memories
I’ve seen this happen so many times: a family chooses to only get digital images of their portraits because they’re not sure yet how to display them or because they prefer the lower cost. When they get their photos, they love them and cherish them, they share them on social media and maybe use them on a Christmas card…and then they forget about them forever. It’s a simple problem of “out of sight, out of mind.”
Printed portraits give you the joy of your treasured photos every day when you see them in your home. That one photoshoot can bring you joy and memories for decades to come. They can do the same for loved ones too if you gift printed portraits to someone.
Getting Your Family’s Next Favorite Portrait
Printed photos simply have a lasting and sentimental quality that you don’t get from digital images alone, and I’m honored to help families throughout the Seattle area experience that joy. I can do that for you too! Contact Jaimié Birtel Photography to book your session or to learn more.
