A Printed Memory | Have You Print Your Photographs Lately?

© 2011 Wazari Wazir | A Printed Memory | Have You Print Your Photographs Lately

Back in the old film days we used to print our picture whenever we finished shooting a roll of film, straight away we will head for the nearest photo lab in town to get our roll of film develop and get the negatives printed. It was a joy back then to see our pictures in prints. These days people who own a digital camera rarely got their personal pictures printed, yes they did prints for their customers but hardly for themselves. Most of the people especially my close friends that I knew are more than just happy to share their pictures online, flickr, blog and off-course on facebook.

It is not that they don’t have the money to print the pictures, but maybe lack of time to sort through thousand of pictures that they have taken or it is cumbersome for them to visit to a photo lab. I still prints my picture regularly, even though I did not print every single frame of it, I choose the best among the rest and have them printed.

We can’t rely on hard disk, they will get corrupted some day without warning, if worst come to worse happens to my digital files that was occupying my hard disk, I still get the printed picture, it may be small in size but most importantly I get the memory printed and a printed pictures will last for many years, and it was proven that it can last for more than a hundred years, or maybe for a thousand years if it is well kept but things might not be the same for digital file, do you think that your hard disk will last for a hundred years? You need to back up your hard disk regularly and it can be too costly in the long run and personally for me, nothing can beat a printed photograph. The colors may fade over the time but the memory will stays.

Some of my friends have asked me, did I get the tones exactly like it was edited? Yes they have, I mean all of the printed photographs have the tones just like what you saw here in my blog and my flickr.

Here’s the tips on how to get the tone or the colors exactly like the way you want it. Actually at first it will be trial and error, you need to find the best photo lab you can find, maybe you can asked your friends for some recommendation and once you found one stick with it. You may never get the same quality from every photo lab for sure. Some are better than the other, I’ve been using this photo lab, for quite a few years, I don’t like to keeps on changing photo lab. The lab that I use is not a professional photo lab where professional photographers send their pictures for customize photo album, it was just a normal photo lab where you can find inside shopping malls.

Whenever I wanted to print a picture, I will tell the person who is in charge printing the picture, not to make any adjustment to it, I tell them to just print it like it is, never change the color and never change the exposure, just print. Remember to talk to the person who are responsible to make the print because when you come over to their counter, there may be few person at the counter and you need to know which one of them printed the pictures and if you talk to the wrong person, you might not get the result that you want.

Once you get the photograph back, analyze it, is it too dark or is it too bright, then for the next print, you customize your editing based on the characteristic of the photo lab output. This is what I normally do and I’m quite satisfied with the result that I get from this photo lab. If you are not too concerned about color tone, or you just want your picture to look natural, I think that wasn’t very difficult, most printer are by default will produce natural looking colors but still you need to test few prints and see whether you like the result or not.

The most important thing is to get the photographs printed and believe me, holding a twenty or fifty years old of a printed photograph is not the same as looking at fifty years old picture on your computer screen, it will never be the same. A printed memory is priceless. Don’t wait until it was too late, get the photographs printed.

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