Here we are, mere days away from the end of the year, and I’m still tying up the last of my organization project for the year. I would have posted on today’s subject (photos) about 2-3 weeks ago, but you’ll see later on in the post why I waited.
For basically my whole life (well, at least since I was about 12 or so), I feel like I’ve been “the official photographer of life, family, and the friend group” wherever I go. Growing up, I had numerous friends tell me that they were so glad that I was taking pictures of everything because they knew they could just steal some doubles off of me. Since our purchase this year of our first DSLR, that expectation has only gotten even more pronounced.
So, with over 15 years of avid picture-taking under my belt, you can probably imagine why the “before” shots of my photos look the way they do. The funny thing? I already DID have a lot of pictures sorted into albums (about 10 photo albums, to be more precise) before ever attempting this project. But since my acquirement of a digital camera, my organization basically had gone to the dogs.
In my teens, my film camera was with me wherever I went, and I took in a roll to get developed about once a month (more or less). I would eagerly wait (hardly able to stand the excitement of not knowing what was going to come out!) for the arrival of my pictures, and my friends and I would sit for hours poring over the results. Eventually, we all would carefully hand-select the ones that would go into the picture albums that were always on display in my room, and you never knew photo albums to be so looked-over and adored.
I don’t know what it is about digital cameras, but for some reason, it made the magic of getting pictures developed go away. (Maybe it was the lack of surprise?). Whatever it was, I stopped getting pictures developed regularly, and whenever I actually DID choose to develop my photos, I did it only once or twice a year (if even that), and I did it in gargantuan amounts, which meant that the task to sort them into albums seemed a little overwhelming.
But no longer—I set out to sort those photos for once and all (at least for now), and I wanted my photos to be in a format I could actually ENJOY so that the sight of that haphazard photo box could stop filling me with shame.
Photo To-Do List
*Buy a couple photo albums that could house several hundred photos apiece
*Put all digital prints straight into the photo albums (since I only developed the good ones, and I only got single prints)
*Go through the rest of the film photos and sort:
-throw-away pictures (blurry, finger over flash, etc.)
-pictures I wanted in the new photo albums (put into piles by year)
-pictures I had in other photo albums already
-doubles that other people might want
*Deal with each of the piles
*Mail out the doubles along with our Christmas card for a little holiday surprise to the people in the pictures 🙂
Still Needing to Do:
*Decide which digital photos I still need to develop and develop them
*Organize the remaining negatives/leftover doubles by year
*Label the backs of all the photos with the date and the people in them (this might have to be a goal to accomplish over the course of a whole year)
My favorite part of this whole process was going through the doubles and getting them ready to send out to everyone. I’d hardly told anyone what I was up to, so I hope that some of my friends and family got a fun surprise when they received little photo packages in the mail.
Now I just have to tackle my last remaining project of the year:
Our bedroom.
Wish me luck 🙂
Do you develop pictures less now that digital photography is so popular?
