Photography has grown to become one of the most important and accessible ways of capturing and sharing memories over the decades. Memories are made every day, for fun, special family moments or important world events. Occasionally, we should take time to go back to our photographs and think about how we can organise, protect and share the memories better.
It used to be that we were able to capture one moment at a time and share it on a piece of paper as a photograph. Part of the excitement was being able to hold a slice of life in your hands while sharing the resultant emotion. Going from black and white photography to colour only served to bring the memory closer to how it looked, since we live in a world filled with colour. These advances in technology inspired people to do more with photography as the medium for capturing the images took great strides forward. We moved from an era where one could take one image needing people to freeze for up to 30 minutes at a time – to being able to take several images of some action in a second.
According to the Bond Capital Internet Trends Report 2019, people generated over a trillion new images annually in 2017 and shared over a billion images monthly in 2018. It is undeniable that technological advances have given us the potential to generate an incredible number of images. Technology has also developed ways of helping us store these images or memories, saving us from being overwhelmed with where to stack our photo albums. Along with the physical photos, we now have hard drives, secure digital cards, online storage platforms and even the cloud. We are also able to use social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook to store our images, which can be automatically catalogued by date, location and caption to help manage our photo memories. It is important and at times a challenge to keep our extensive personal archive virtually up to date and to be able to cherish the captured moments any time.
We currently enjoy all these modern platforms for helping us manage the images we capture, keep and share with friends and family, often with the click of a button. However, in all photos, some images are more special than the rest, but are constantly in danger of being lost in the flood of images we interact with daily. Perhaps it is time to look back to where it all started, when special memories could be held in our hands as photographs and shared with the next waiting pair of hands. The simple act of sharing a moment personally in an all-too-digital world is still as special today as it was when people first looked at black and white images of their lives.
Today, anyone can print high-quality photos and create memories at home. So as we near the end of a challenging year, take a moment to slow it down and take time to look through the images on the SD cards, hard drives, cloud storage or social media accounts. Select those precious memories, print them out and place them in a special book that you can keep nearby. Invite some friends and family over to share these special memories and stories that they contain, to relive the best moments of our lives all over again. Don’t forget to take more photos while you share these old memories, and please share the link to the photo album, so everyone can print out their own albums when they return home.
*Djouahra is Sales and Marketing Director at Canon, Central and North Africa
