Awhile back, I wrote about my love for paper scrapbooking when compared to digital scrapbooking. At the time I was also a dedicated user of paper in my photography, in the form of traditional film and processing. But recently I’ve seen more and more the advantages of digital photography and have begun taking most of my photos in that format. This is a big change for someone who has owned a film SLR camera since high school, and been an avid film photographer since I was in elementary school. Since the advent of digital photography I have been a strong supporter of film for it’s archival benefits. But some compelling arguements and changes in technology have recently swayed me to the benefits of going primarily digital.
The first factor that influenced this change was cost savings. As an avid photographer (this Christmas Eve and Christmas day I took almost 150 photos) I was spending a fortune just to develop and print my rolls of photographs. Then they sat in boxes waiting to be scrapbooked, or got thrown out when I discovered that they hadn’t turned out like I hoped. If I got a photo enlarged to scrapbook, the original smaller print often went unused and was wasted. And I took many more photos than necessary as “insurance” shots. Many of these were wasted because they were either duplicate good shots or all wasted unusable ones.
Switching to digital saves me money in this area in several ways. First, there is no charge to simply process photos to see how they came out. I can see immediately on my camera’s screen if I’ve gotten the photo I wanted, and can take additional “insurance” shots at no cost if I so desire. I only pay to print exactly what I need in the exact sizes and quantities that I want to use either to scrap or to share with family members. No more paying $10 a roll only to discover nothing on the roll was even usable!
The second advantage of digital photographs is the ability to back them up easier than negatives. Although I must admit I have yet to do so, it is possible to burn duplicate copies of digital photos on to CD’s and save them at a separate location from the ones you store in your home. If a house fire or other such calamity (and I live in wildfire and hurricane affected areas) were to damage the CD’s stored at your home, backup copies would still exist at your parents’ or friends’ house, or in your bank safe-deposit box. This is simply not possible with negatives since there can only be one first-generation of film.
Ease of storage, as well as the security I mentioned above, is also a third advantage. A hundred photo files on CD take up way less room in your home than 100 film photos and their negatives. Multiply that by the hundreds of photos I take a year and the storage advantage to digital photography becomes quite a benefit!
A fourth advantage is the ability to edit a photo before you pay to print it. Want to enlarge and crop a photo to zoom in on your subject? With a paper print you would have to pay for an enlargement and then manually trim it. With a digital photo, you can do the zooming and cropping on the computer and then print the photo the exact size you want. No waste means cost savings! Also, you can make simple corrections like lighting, or redeye, before a photo is printed, improving the quality of your photos, and by extension, your scrapbook page product. And as we scrapbookers are getting more digital in our work, we can also do
things like add effects or text to our photos and print them that way for artistic effect on our layouts…you can’t do that at all to a film photo without scanning it first and losing some of the quality in the next generation print.
Digital photography is becoming more and more within reach of the average consumer and scrapbooker in many ways. More people than ever have basic computer skills and computers in their homes. Good quality cameras are becoming more affordable and easier to use, while more and more labs are acquiring the ability to print from digital media for their customers, thus ensuring your prints a longer life and higher quality than a computer print-out can. Digital photos can be easily, quickly and affordably shared via email among those we love as we become more and more spread out geographically in this modern age.
With all those benefits, why not give it a try? Digital is the future, and the future, I believe, is now!
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