The BEST Way to Slow Down Time | College Station Newborn Photographer

The following is a special guest post by our sales director, Chelsea Briers.  Read, enjoy, comment, and share.

This past Mother’s Day we spent a leisurely afternoon at the home of my in-laws surrounded by four generations of Briers women, lots of great stories, and plenty of yummy food cooked by the men folk.  I just love walking through their home, because every wall tells a story of their family at a specific moment in time.  The dining room is one of my favorites, because one wall is adorned with a beautifully glamorous portrait of my husband’s grandmother taken around 1940.  It always makes me think… What portraits do I have that my sweet girls will want to hang on their walls in 75 years? And then the new school of thought worms into my mind… Or will they actually ask me for the floppy disk/CD/USB of family pictures I have stored in a climate controlled unit somewhere?

With the high demand for digital images and the rapid advance of technology in the past five years what is the best way to preserve these sweet memories we work so hard to capture?  Let me walk you through my thoughts on this topic and feel free to comment with your own!  In the last 30 years alone, I have worked with many storage devices (floppy disks, CDs, DVDs, USBs, external hard drives, “the cloud”) and I doubt technology will slow down anytime soon. So, naturally, we have to ask the question, “Is it better to store all of our memories digitally?”

Let’s say we were ahead of the curve and backed up our favorite memories on a shoebox full of floppy disks in the early 1990s.  In the next few years we would have either replaced our computer and needed to load all those memories back on the new one or found the ease of using CDs which stored many more images than those floppies and needed to transfer everything onto a CD and trash the floppies. Ten years later, again there is a new home computer and you would need to transfer these images from your back up CDs to your hard drive and/or you may want to change your back up method from CDs to a DVD or USB depending. Now, present day, the storage method of choice is either an external hard drive or the cloud and the cycle continues. Many computers are no longer made with some of the earlier storage methods.  Floppy disk, anyone?

So, in the last 25 years, let’s assume you had plenty of spare time and you put in the numerous man hours necessary to store and continue to update all of your digital images.  We will also need to assume that none of your floppy disks/CDs/DVDs/External Hard Drives were lost, corrupted, damaged, etc. along the way.  If so, congratulations! Your digital images would have survived 25 years and you can print them from a consumer quality online printing company.  But wait… if the goal is saving memories for generations, the problem now becomes those companies do not offer archival quality print products directly to consumers, so fingers crossed that these products don’t fade or change colors or fall apart over the next 50 years.

Could it be possible that our grandparents had it right and technology doesn’t always make things easier?  I’m honestly tired just typing up all the work needed to store and maintain digital files.  So, what is my method of choice to store sweet memories with no stress and lots of joy? Use a professional photographer to capture these special moments, use a professional lab to order your archival quality print products that will last over 100 years, hang them on your walls so you can enjoy them every single day, and pass them down to your loved ones when the time comes.  Whew, now time to sip my coffee and stare at the beauties I have framed dreaming of which daughter will want our engagement portraits and which will want the very first portrait of us as a family of four.

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Shannon Morton Photography, LLC is a professional maternity, newborn, children, and family photographer living in the Bryan/College Station, TX area.  Through her studio, you have access to the kind of quality printing that will ensure the longest lasting prints and the MOST value for your money.  Email her today to schedule your session: info@shannonmorton.net