Family Snaps

Bill Pierce

Bill Pierce

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I wonder if the “family album” is on its way out - not the family photos, but the family album, that book or box of paper prints that is being supplanted by email attachments and pictures on the web?

I inherited the family album with pictures of, not only my immediate family, but pictures from the albums of grandparents from both sides of the family. Now my family album has those pictures, pictures from my wife’s collection of family albums and all those family pictures I have taken. Albums take up a full shelf of the living room book cabinets and 11 boxes of prints seem to have snuck into the office where my “professional” work lives. Of course the digital scans of negatives and digital raw files exist on a RAID system and on and off site hard discs. But those metal boxes don’t look any different from the metal boxes with financial records, correspondence and misc. text. I suspect when we die, those faceless metal boxes get trashed. Guaranteed they get trashed if they are password protected. But if someone opens up one of those paper print family albums, it’s pretty obvious what they are. “Oh, look, it’s Grandpa and the dog.”

I’ve spent much of my time taking “professional” pictures, but the pictures that mean the most to me are the ones recall an adventure, a special moment in my life, and there the family pictures probably outnumber the professional pictures. Those are the pictures I want to share. And I think that is probably best done with boxes and books of paper prints, not email and websites.

Your thoughts?
 
I'm 65, so keep in mind that I have a big box filled with both my wife's mother's pictures, some of my mother's family pictures, and pictures that we as a couple added to the pile.
Now after quite a few years where film lapsed and digital took over, I'm back to film. All the digital family pictures are on a couple of CD's, but a bunch have been lost.
Although I am a artisan/craftsman by trade, all of my pictures through the years have mainly been family snaps, with a few portraits of "rusty nails" as my sister calls my art pictures.
Once I got re-going with film, I realized that I couldn't stand the pressure of trying to produce "great pictures" and found my home making pics of family and friends, standing around smiling at weddings, vacations and other special events.
I am developing my B&W film and scanning them, printing the ones that I want to add to the family pile. I'll send out the color film to the budget lab, no fine art prints necessary.
Now when I go on a photo outing I want a person in the frame, hopefully a friend or family member, a nice landscape and maybe a sailboat in the background if I get lucky.
 
Bill Pierce said:
I wonder if the “family album” is on its way out - not the family photos, but the family album, that book or box of paper prints that is being supplanted by email attachments and pictures on the web?

I inherited the family album with pictures of, not only my immediate family, but pictures from the albums of grandparents from both sides of the family. Now my family album has those pictures, pictures from my wife’s collection of family albums and all those family pictures I have taken. Albums take up a full shelf of the living room book cabinets and 11 boxes of prints seem to have snuck into the office where my “professional” work lives. Of course the digital scans of negatives and digital raw files exist on a RAID system and on and off site hard discs. But those metal boxes don’t look any different from the metal boxes with financial records, correspondence and misc. text. I suspect when we die, those faceless metal boxes get trashed. Guaranteed they get trashed if they are password protected. But if someone opens up one of those paper print family albums, it’s pretty obvious what they are. “Oh, look, it’s Grandpa and the dog.”

I’ve spent much of my time taking “professional” pictures, but the pictures that mean the most to me are the ones recall an adventure, a special moment in my life, and there the family pictures probably outnumber the professional pictures. Those are the pictures I want to share. And I think that is probably best done with boxes and books of paper prints, not email and websites.

Your thoughts?
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Great topic. I actually gave this a lot of thought during this past Christmas season with my family.

While I host a private family gallery, sorted by month, on Smugmug for my family, older members miss hard prints to get and hold.

I plan to print much more this year and mail prints to family members. It's a huge shift personally, but I think we will all appreciate it more in the long run :)
 
My wife, if picture is good, will ask to print it on 8x10 and we will have it on the wall. Usually it is only few pictures per year and she likes to change them from time to time.
But once picture is off the wall it has no merit. Well, I have about 6K+ JPEG1 files of these images and older scans redundantly stored.

But! Our kids like to have albums and mother-in-law recently did personal album for each child.

After getting cheap but wonderful (on results) Epson 88+ I'm slowly printing from those 6K+ JPEG1 files on 6x4 gloss paper.

I made my first attempt on previous week. Multi-Media album from Michaels Art store with glued in family snaps, taken by us with some of us.

33875757641_30d110b9ac_t.jpg


34005378155_74423649e3_t.jpg



My next project is the family album from bw negatives with family snapshots taken on single roll, but never printed until I did it in 2016. Dozen of 5x7 prints on old, but great AGFA Brovira paper. It is shame to keep them in the box. I want to make this album by myself using Japanese album binding. This method of pages stitching looks like less difficult one.

DIY album seems to be best available option for me. Local prices for classic, no plastic albums are high. And it is hard to even find one here.
 
Bill Pierce said:
. . . Those are the pictures I want to share. And I think that is probably best done with boxes and books of paper prints, not email and websites.
Click to expand...
Dear Bill,

For us, maybe. But perhaps not (at the moment) for younger people. Which is not to say that they will be incapable of appreciating real prints more as they grow older.

For example, I have a dual frame with two pictures: a young naval officer in his late 20s and his wife at about the same age. My parents, in the 1950s.

But how do we communicate the power, value and durability of real prints to the younger people in question?

Cheers,

R.
 
Like a lot of people of a certain age group, I still have family albums (and wedding album) from when I was younger. These albums obviously consisted of prints that were affixed to album pages via plastic sleeves or cardboard tabs.

However, for the past 10-12 years, I have primarily used a digital camera to capture family and travel photos, which are more conducive to digital albums, in which images are printed directly on the album's pages.

So, IMO and especially in my case, the family album per se is not on its way out, but rather, has evolved to leverage digital capture and digital printing.
 
When I retired, I began scanning a good sampling of the family & friends prints and negatives In my posession. Opened a personal web domain and have been uploading to that for 10 years now.
As we are scatterd all over the country, paper prints isn't (aren't ?) a good choice for me.
When I pass on to my heavenly mansion, my son owns the web domain.
 
Roger Hicks said:
Dear Bill,

For us, maybe. But perhaps not (at the moment) for younger people. Which is not to say that they will be incapable of appreciating real prints more as they grow older.

For example, I have a dual frame with two pictures: a young naval officer in his late 20s and his wife at about the same age. My parents, in the 1950s.

But how do we communicate the power, value and durability of real prints to the younger people in question?

Cheers,

R.
Click to expand...

Roger -

I don’t know. I used to attach an image, just for the fun of it, where it made any sense or not, to almost every email I ever sent. I still do to a lesser extent, but I’ve become quite disappointed by the fact that the image I send out, isn’t the image folks see. We’re not even talking about color and tonal match. Any set of monitor standards got lost long ago. We’re talking about something as simple as folks don’t adjust their monitor brightness or insist on looking at my epic and mural worthy images on their cel phone. Now, once or twice a week when I’m not on the road, I send out postcards to friends and even some professional associates. Initially, I was using it as a way to avoid throwing away small proof prints. But it received such a positive response that, now, I actually print out a set of postcards. I have one friend who is actually a fairly big deal in the photo world, and the last time I visited him he showed me 33 of my postcards that he has saved. I sure don’t think he is saving my emails.

I’m not putting down family pics on the web. I just want them to have a longer life than me, and I think that’s the function of a print.

Pierce
 
Hmmmmm .... are we talking about family snapshots or our "artistic" work?
My dad' s utterly awful 8mm films and mom's box camera snaps are my cherished posessions.
 
It's a matter of priorities and, if, photography/photos is one of them, time will be allocated to preserve memories with photographs.

I find more negatives than prints from our families. I have, from both of my grandparents, negatives that go back a hundred years. They didn't have prints, maybe lost them or could only afford the cost to process film. A few years ago one of my aunts, she is 102 now, had some negatives in an envelope and I made prints for her. 5x7.

To me the negatives/transperancies are worth more than prints.

Many of those negatives were made before most folks had enlargements made. Just contact prints. I remember when Kodak had paper for making contact prints.

I've got so many rolls of black and white film developed that I need to spend the next several years living in my darkroom! The making of the images is one thing thing, the rest is not my cup of tea!

It's easier with digital working the process stage.

I enjoy creating the photographs. The rest, let someboday else do it.
 
I have a box with several hundred negatives in it. Old snaps of the family made by my father and his brothers, maybe my mother, and maybe my grandfather. There's only one person left alive would would know all of the people in these photos.

My goal is to scan them all and get them to him before he passes on (he's in his 80s and not in good shape), maybe get names and relationships attached to these photos. Once I have those, I will print them all to postcard size and put them in a shoebox.

Because a shoebox full of prints is eternal. I have a couple of them of my own photos...

Someone may one day be grateful for what I do. I don't count on it. I do it because it pleases me. :)

G
 
I still create mini event albums... by place and date... normally less than 80 photos per. Individual photos go on social media, but it's so much nicer to chat over a glass of wine and page through the photos... for sure the senior relatives enjoy looking through the photos at their own pace and usually hang on to the albums for a longer periods of time...
 
The thing about prints is that as a physical artifact, they are more likely to survive neglect than digital files and be rediscovered by the generation after next.

The Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) is the world's greatest repository of genealogical knowledge, because of their belief in retroactive (even posthumous) conversion. The Internet Archive preserves the web, and also books now. Who will take the same role as curator of family photographs for future generations and historians?
 
In my area (Sydney) families seem to be creating photo books (Blurb etc) as their main way of archiving family photos with the hope they will not be thrown out. They are often created for special occasions e.g. an 18th or 21st birthday. I'm not sure how many get minilab prints done..

I've printed a shoebox of 4x6" prints of their childhood for each of my daughters. My youngest, at least, seems to look through them every so often. My family pictures are in albums, but no-one ever seems to look through them.
 
I'm the one in my family that has and that has taken most of the photos. I have my fathers photos and slide as well as my father-in-laws. I do worry like you that they will all be trashed.

One of my father's shots that was almost thrown out, my mother is to the left.

Mt Rainer 1939 by John Carter, on Flickr
 
I made myself a rule, for each photo outing at least one photo has to be printed! Place and date on the back, maybe sometimes a couple of notes.
robert

PS: and when a someone ask me a photo I do not send a mail or a file, I sent a print, maybe a small one but a feral print!
 
I shoot only film but all my negatives are then scanned. The most important images are then printed and the images with family significance are then framed A4 size and proudly displayed on our walls. Albums per se are of less importance to me than the fact that paper copies exist and the negatives are cataloged and archived. I am currently trying to make "proper portraits" of family members and this personal project started when my Mother turned 90 and I made the time to shoot decent characterful portraits that hopefully tell a little about her as a person. I want to keep a real record of family for my daughter and her decendants to enjoy and it scares me that we have a generation of people now alive that will leave no visual legacy.
 
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