Before I start this piece I just want to say I do not hope for a return to the days of film nor do I look a digital as the end of classic photography, you will never hear me say ‘you not t true photographer unless you know the difference between Kodachrome and Velvia’. Quite the opposite I bought my first digital camera as soon as they became available, it was a 0.3 megapixel point and shoot and even tax free in the Canaries it cost me nearly as much as the holiday. At full HQ it would take about 40 pictures and eat through 4 AA’s in no time but it was a revolution to me but I will talk more about that in another post.
Back to printing. I have terabytes’s of images collected over the 12 ish years of shooting digital but I still enjoy the tactile interaction of a print. I have a few digital photo frames but I hardly ever turn them on, I do have frames and prints on my walls, from little 6×4’s to some fairly large canvases and even a few photobooks I have had printed. It still enjoy consuming images online or even sitting down with Kerri and the kids some times and hooking my pc up to my 50” plasma to look at pictures we haven’t seen for years but these will never replace the pictures I have scattered in various sizes, shapes and miss match of frames around the house, each one is like an an old friend that in my head I say hi to each time I walk passed them.
I often smile when walking around the house as the memories of the pictures takes me back to that time they were taken, my son using his pram to steady himself when he was learning to walk, he is now 21 and living thousands of miles away at Uni. Our youngest daughter sat on my shoulders on a day out when she was 3. Her sister with hair sticking out in every direction at 2, now transforming into a teenager and the good and bad that come with that, our eldest daughter when she was a little chubby at 9 and is now becoming a beautiful, confident woman. My wife when we first met some 18 years ago, she hasn’t changed.
I guess it is because of how these images make me feel that I always want to make sure my brides come away with a physical picture, an album, a canvas or even a set of prints. I know the market is such that more and more people want to have digital copies and I understand ‘so do I’ I love posting my pictures on the likes of facebook and how that allows me to share them with friends and family. I love being able to open up my laptop and see images of just about anything from every corner of our world and beyond. I don’t at all think that digital is killing print but instead it is giving it new life and new possibilities. I love to share images on line and as always will close this post by directing you to a couple of the places I show of my work online, first for weddings and many of these images have already been turned into a print in one form or another http://www.somerset-wedding.com and a second where you will find so many more digital examples of my work https://www.facebook.com/Photographybybryanfarrell
A final thought “There will always be a place for a physical print and I will always have a spare piece of wall or shelf to place it”.
Bryan.
