From all your clicks, how many photographs do you actually develop? What is the embarrassing ratio – one out of a thousand, or ten thousand, or a hundred-thousand?
I did some research and asked a few friends. One couple had never developed any photo that they’d taken, neither from their vacation nor their daily iphone shoots. Another couple had developed two photos (out of thousands of clicks on their hard-drives), and even those were done as gifts for their parents.
So what is it with us, that we stop to capture almost anything with out smartphones – our dog jumping, our child splashing, our sister riding her bike – yet hardly ever do those clicks bear the fruit of photographs?
Ok, you’d say that social media spares us the need of physical prints. You click on the iphone and upload it onto Facebook or Picasa or Flickr. But isn’t that the same as leaving it on your hard-drive, where within a day or two it will never be seen again?
So I am tempted to launch a Yuba City Photographers campaign, where I visit people’s homes and explain to them the importance of printing their digital negatives, of following through all those many haphazard clicks and seeing that the best of them flower into fully-fledged photographs.
You can make timeless memoirs out of your photographs, print pocket-sized copies to place in your wallet, frame canvas prints to hang on your walls or creatively make your own custom cards. It’s all a matter of a little effort beyond pulling out your smartphone and clicking, the little effort of following through.
