Relive tThe Past With An Actual Photo Album
All through my childhood and even into my forties, there has always been one if not many photo albums in peoples homes. A lot of the times the
family album was in the main room of the home so anyone could enjoy browsing through them. Most of the time they had nice white borders with the date on them that made it easy to recall what year the photo was from when views years later.
Once I started making photographs and taken an in-depth plunge into the craft of photography, by the time digital cameras hit the market, I had built up quite a collection of photo albums.
Over the last decade of photography and most all would be digital captures, either with camera or phone camera. Although I have shot and printed with film over the last decade, I have used most of the images from a CD the lab created instead of prints.
Fast Forward to 2025
For the last 25 years and more, I have carried a bundle of photo albums from place to place as I moved from various apartments and now to a new home. A year later after moving in, I took the chance to look through the albums. Most of them are filled with plastic pages holding 35mm color transparencies that date back to 1980.
In the 90's I began doing my own E-6 processing, and so as a result my image making grew since processing cost were far less doing it in my darkroom. plus the overall experience in shooting a roll of slide film and then developing it is so rewarding. To hold that finished roll up to the light and see all the little transparencies in color sends a warm feeling throughout... of course if you are a photographer and processed the film yourself.
I glanced through the prints album and see that I have prints from as far back as the 60’s. I did run across a few random digital images I had printed at one time or another. But overall the scenes from life after year 2000 just were not in the album and a lot of blank pages are left yet to be filled.
Once I realized I needed to revitalize this album, the task of looking through 25 years of digital images had begun with disassembling the album and arranging the photos by theme, such as family, vacations, sports and so forth. While the possible volatility rate of digital image files is much greater than that of preserving negatives, the ability to search through digital images is far quicker and easier than looking through pages and pages of negatives.
Since there was going to be way too many images I wanted to put in the album, I had to be a bit selective as I weeded through the RAW camera files and assorted JPEG files.
I made template file in Photoshop so I could print six, 4x6 prints at once and then trim them apart. The process was also fun in getting to look over 25 years of image making and the various scenes and events I had captured.
A Vivid Walk Down Memory Lane
Aside from the fact I was going to update and revitalize my 20+ year old photo album, I also got to look back through digital images captured since I first went digital back in 2002 with a 6MP Nikon D100. As I viewed the array of thumbnails, I found myself opening quite a few images and realized I'm gonna need to pick my top favorites first.
It didn't take long before I had accumulated a backlog of images to print, even doing six at a time. I still had to trim them down after printing and get them ready to insert in the areas of the album designated for the prints I made. Having segments in the album now for family, events with friends, motocross years, mountain biking years and so forth. This way I could add to the album as I ended up finding certain images later. I was leave three to six empty spaces at the end of each section so i could go back after its done and fill in from the photos I wanted to use but wasn't sure at the time if I had enough spaces available.
As I poured through the photos in the album and the digital ones I had printed, it was a great time of reflecting back on earlier times in life. To make those comparisons as to how old you are now, or what car you drove back then and so forth. For me, it even opened up some memories that had gotten covered over and recalling things I may have encountered that I had long forgotten.
As it turns out... Making a photo album is well worth the efforts once you hold that book in your lap and leaf through the pages. Although I have created about a dozen photo slide-shows on-line, its still not like holding that book of prints in your very own hands.
And much to my surprise and a real "jog" to my memory was a photo album I had printed back when I first went digital. I just happened to open it up to pages that had both award winner images from over 40 years ago.
One print was a hand colored Black & White scene of a Ford Edsel front of a hardware store that was featured in a Huntington, WV newspaper competition around 1980 in which it received an honorable mention.
The other print is a scene captured with with Ektachrome slide-film that was scanned and then printed digitally. The eagle from Chimney Rock also received an Honorable Mention in a Charlotte, NC newspaper competition around 1988. I love holding the hand colored Black & White, it's like a piece of history. To think back 25 years ago when I developed the film and printed this print, then hand colored the car with Marshall's Photo Oils.
All in all the album had about seventy five 8x10 digital prints from a mix of scanned color slides and digital captures with my first digital camera, a Nikon D100. There were even a couple prints in the album in which I have lost the digital file somewhere along the way. You gotta remember that hard drives don't last forever.
Through this process of rebuilding a photo album, I can say it has been a great memory refresher. There were so many forgotten moments that I had captured with a camera. Although it took me a few weeks of sorting and printing, I finally have my revitalized photo album packed with a lifetime of events I had captured.
I will purposely leave it out in eyesight somewhere so that I can be tempted to glace through it and relive those moments I felt that I wanted to capture. I look at it like freezing moments in time.
The Digital Frame Is The New Photo Album
There is one thing about having that print to hold, but for Fathers Day I was given a Digital Photo Frame. And what can I say... Game Changer!
For me this seems like the ultimate "Photo Album" that is easier to display photos and share in a room than any print album could be.
Now when visitors are sitting around the coffee table... no need to drag out the photo albums, they can just see the slideshow whether they want to or not.
In the end it's not about making a photo album, but the ease of viewing and sharing the mass of photos you have taken. And the presentation is accessible without having to look at a phone or mobile device. The digital frame is the new photo album it seems. At least for me it seems to be the best option to share your photos much like the days past when we had that album full of prints in plastic sleeves to show off to friends and family.
There again, it's not like holding a book of prints in your hand, but if it means you can view those cherished photos instead of keeping them locked away on some mobile device or computer hard drive... Thats better than them not being easily accessible at all.
After having the Digital Frame sitting on one of the tables in the living room, I have grown to absolutely love it. The coolest feature to me is being to send a new photo to it when even I want from my phone . I can make an image and have it on the Digital Frame within seconds if I wanted to. No need to get on the computer and print the photo and trim it down to size and put it in the photo album. With the Digital Frame set to every 30 seconds it changes to another photo and thats even at random.
It has become quite a part of my day now, since whenever I'm sitting in the living room, I sometimes lie on the couch and just watch a slide show for a few minutes. And subsequently the project of making an actual photo print photo album has been taken off the front burner for now.
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