Striking Images

So whats it all about? Sure we have pictures stored everywhere but none hanging on our wall, sitting by our bed, on our furniture or even stuffed into a shoebox in our attic. I wrote a piece a while ago that created some stirrings in people titled “Don’t let your kids grow up to be JPEGs“. It was about that very title.

You may lose your phone, sit helplessly as your computer fails to boot up, wonder what that ‘crunching’ noise is coming from your hard drive and all the while lament over the pictures and information that is now gone to the ‘big electronics graveyard in the sky’.

So this week (not today ‘cos I know you are busy!) drop those pictures onto a USB stick or burn them to that disc and go get them printed. If they are crap, print them! If they are off colour, print them! If thy are badly focused, print them. Those were the pictures taken at the most incredible of times and they are the pictures that will be viewed fondly for the memory they evoke and not the frowned upon for the quality of the image.

Pictures make people talk (some might say they a thousand words). They serve as a memory of us, of our being, long after we are gone. Even the crappy ones make you laugh, cry and ponder.

I have seen this myself. Whilst cleaning out my family home after my parents passed. The attic stuffed with old games and toys belonging to my two sisters and I, remnants of old carpet (why did our parents keep that?). Cassette tapes, old Commodore 64′s, Sinclair ZX81 computers which had 1k and needed to be connected to a television to work. All went into refuse.

What was not discarded were the shoeboxes. Not containing shoes, but pictures! A pictorial history of a family growing. Badly discolored, ‘dog-earred’ and worn out but priceless. Shot by my parents on Rolleicords and Rolleiflexes, Polaroids and film negative. Neither of my parents were photographers but they understood the meaning of an event and captured it.

A lot of professional photographers I know do or don’t, might or might not, “sure I do” or “I most certainly don’t” provide a disc of Hi Res wedding images as a ‘package’ on the price list. The fear in this is that it will go the way of VHS tapes, bus conductors and mixed cassette tapes. Unusable, unreadable and discarded.

Life gets busy after your wedding and you slot back into the rigors of life. The disc goes into the kitchen drawer and you have every intention of getting some pictures printed…….but you never do.

So when the kids come along and want to see your wedding pictures, they can’t. They ponder, “who was minding me on your wedding day?” – they won’t because you have nothing to show them of your life before them. A wedding album is like a fine wine, it gets better with age and I, even as a wedding photographer, have only come to appreciate that now in my early forties. The wedding shots were taken on the day, chosen by Sarah and I and put into a wedding album which, in due course, ended up hidden in a press. It only came to life again when the small people arrived, as will yours. So make sure and get one.

My four year old asks me lots of questions, most of which I cannot answer like “why is milk white?” and “what colour is paint before the man puts the colour in?” but one thing I can show him is my life when I was his age and a little older and a little older and a little older. So the question I’ll never be asked is “Why aren’t you small like me?” because I was and I can prove it!

Pictures  © John Ryan Photography 1997.

Later

C