Digital Photography

I'm encouraging people not to give up the pleasure of photo prints when they go ‘digital’ with their cameras. Yes, the pictures are beautiful when lit up on a computer screen, but they don’t really get seen easily that way – and too many people lose them in their file system and then can’t recover one anyway. (That’s assuming they downloaded them from the camera in the first place, which apparently many people also don’t do!) I don’t get why one would print up photos in a 4x6 format, when photo paper comes in 8½ by 11 sheets, which is the best way to include them in photo albums. So my method is to create a collage of pictures and text on a single sheet – an album page – and print them out.

I use several photo processing programs to work on pictures because I like features on one that another just can’t match. But my primary tool is ‘Picture It!’ (by Microsoft) which I use to crop and otherwise doctor up my pictures, and then place several of them on a page together in a ‘pleasing manner’ (yes, I am the arbiter of that) to print. I might take 150 pictures on a hike, for example, and then actually print up 7 or 8 'pages' with 3-8 photos on each page. I take both close-up and long shots so that I have some variety to place on the page. I vary the size and dimensions of the photos, usually leaving a narrow strip of white space around each photo to set it off from the others. I can include the date, place and description of the hike – or describe some amusing anecdote if I want. I can add clip art or colored boxes or even lines and arrows (following the old “Alice’s Restaurant” song) if I want. Taken all together, I have a perfect image of the day.

And, of course, ‘taken all together’ I have cupboards and shelves overrun by photo albums. My computer runs through literally tens of thousands of photo files every time it does a virus scan. I devote many happy hours to my little hobby and more photo paper and ink products than I care to admit.

But I really like them. Really.