Thursday, July 16, 2015

Images

  I want you to take a moment and think; when was the last time you bought film for a camera?  How long has it been since you owned a camera that required film? You do realize, you can still get film processed, very inexpensively. You can take your exposed film to an outlet center, they will send the film to a processing plant, who will develop the film and send your images back on a DVD. In most cases, you will not receive your negatives, they shred them. Why would you need your negatives; you have your images on a DVD. For the majority of people, digital photography is the way they capture and keep their images. It’s easy, cheap and you can share your images instantly for the world to see, right now, on Facebook, Twitter and snapchat. It’s there in an instant, possibly shared by some of your followers and then forgotten. I recently had a conversation with Brian, at Harmon Photo, here in Gainesville, we share the same concern; where is our family’s history going to be in twenty years? He reminded me of our shared concern, which is crossing the photo industry; keeping our history alive with photographs, is a dying tradition.
Many of you will be able to relate a memory from a time when you were a child and anticipated a large family get together, with cousins, aunts and uncles and grandparents. The excitement builds, as the time draws closer, your imagination grows of what the event was going to be like; playing in the water, games, spitting watermelon seeds on your cousins, laying in the grass, looking up and trying to explain what kind of animal the clouds shaped into. You arrive late and when you woke up in the morning, it was raining and the entire brood was sitting around grandma’s house bored and fussing with each other. Grandma goes into her bedroom, brings out some boxes and very soon, the adults are sitting around the dining room table, looking at photographs,  passing them along and commenting; what would that car be worth now or, you really wore that? Soon the children would gather with the adults, where they would point out family members from the past, on yellowed gray, black and white photographs. Pictures were being taken out of the box and handed around and someone would ask grandma; who is this? She would take the photo and stare at it for a moment; that was… The picture of the naked girl running in the yard, only to find out, it was your mom. Everyone is now laughing and pointing at your embarrassed mother, but it’s not what you think, it is a picture was of a three year old girl. You find another picture of your mom, when she was in elementary school. You pick up a photo of your school picture and hold it alongside and stare at the features, how you resemble her. You dig down into the old photos and find an aged, black and white photograph of a teenage couple, standing in front of an old car; who is this grandma? She takes the photo and brings her hand to her mouth as her eyes begin to tear, from a wound which has not yet healed. That is your grandpa and me, going to a church social. She brings the photo back in front of her and touches the image of the young man. There are photos of soldiers and sailors, proms, weddings, family gatherings and funerals, all part of your history, laid out before you. Where do you keep your images?
Fifteen years ago, we kept our images on three inch floppy disks; how many of you have a computer that will read a floppy disc or where could you send the disk off to recover your images? Would it be too expensive, that’s okay, it was just some old pictures. Maybe you’ll store all your new images on a DVD or memory card; are you aware they have 64 gig memory card, that will hold up to seven thousand images? With technology increasing and in order to have the latest and greatest mega pixel gadget and the best and greatest new place to store all your images, in the cloud; what could possibly go wrong? What is going to happen to your family history?

When you’re gone… as they are cleaning out your desk drawers, cabinets and they find old technology on floppy disk, DVD’s or memory cards… it will go into a bag, your history is gone. There will be no sitting around the table laughing and pointing and remembering your history. There will be no touching your history because it will be in the trash heap of forgotten memories.  How will they remember your history? Where are your images?

Here are links to assist you of how to preserve your history;








Thank You, Louise Kehoe, of Kodak, for the information.

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