Nostalgia, Negatives and a New Project

I'm slooooowly editing lots of photos at the moment: some for blog posts about my Nice Days Out, some for a new Book of Craftiness... and some so I can get them professionally printed and put them in actual photo albums.

I've got half a shelf of photo albums but they pretty much stop at the date I bought my first digital camera (around when I left University... which was a while ago now!).

Digital photography is great. Of course it is. Instant photos? That I can easily edit and share? This is magical stuff!

But I can't help but miss the simpler days of finishing a roll of film, and taking it to the chemist (or popping it in the post in one of those pre-paid envelopes) then waiting for that exciting moment when you get to see how your snaps turned out.

Realistically I'm probably never going to go back to using a film camera (do local chemists even still offer cheap next day photo processing like they used to??).

During a recent bit of decluttering I even cleared out the box of negatives I'd been collecting for years "just in case" I wanted to reprint a photo or two. Guess what, younger self: you never, ever did.

Although I might not be able to go back in time or willing to give up the perks of all this shiny modern photo-taking tech, I can still have albums full of photos!

I've made a few photo books of special events (like my sister's wedding) over the years but I'm determined to gradually get my everyday snaps of family and friends and cats out of the (metaphorically) dusty depths of my laptop and printed and into the pages of an album or two.

I've been planning to do this for simply ages (literally years) but I am resolving to devote the time to making it actually happen this year.

Real photos, stuck on real pages with those lovely little old fashioned photo corners and handwritten captions to help me remember who was who and what was what.

What could be nicer than that?

Putting Photos in Albums

Does putting photos in photo albums count as a creative task?

It's been keeping me entertained on quiet evenings this spring, anyway. When I was flipping through my old albums over Christmas I found a lot of photos which teenage and student me thought were worth sticking in an album but which 30-something me really wasn't too impressed with, so I'm re-organising them a bit.

One of the great things about using old-fashioned photo albums and photo corners is the ability to chop up your photos to remove the boring bits and fit more images onto a page, collage-style. I had quite a lot of albums so condensing my collection will save me quite a bit of shelf space and make flipping through them much more interesting (instead of thinking How many more pages of this??). Luckily the same range of albums I was using for my photos 15+ years ago is still in production!

I'm very grateful to my younger self for having been organised enough to put all the photos into albums though (even though I'm now re-doing them years later) because without my captions for each photo I'd have a very hard time remembering everyone's names from school and University! Ah, the perils of getting older.

Once I've sorted out all my old photos I'm going to finally get some of my digital photos printed out and added to my albums so I can enjoy them instead of just having them gathering virtual dust on my hard drive. I loved the photo book I put together of my crafting photos, but I'm happy sticking with old-fashioned photo albums for my personal pics... for now, anyway!