Life in print

Last night while I should have been blogging I was looking through the plethora of photos that have been taken in the last three years (minus several hundred that were lost when our last computer died and we could only recover a portion of them) deciding which photos to go and get printed.
I really love my camera, a beautiful digital SLR Craig bought me for my birthday this year and I love digital photography in general, you can snap away, taking literally hundreds of pics, in an endeavour to capture a moment in time, perfectly, without wasting film or having to pay a small fortune to have a film developed, only to discover there are only one or two shots worth keeping.
And my camera is never far from me as I am addicted to capturing my favourite subjects (no prizes for guessing who) although this does mean that I am rarely in any of our photos because I am always the photographer and although this can be good when it comes to not admitting to how much weight I have gained, I would like to have some pics of me and my most precious people for the future.
But how many photos do we print off these days? When the mobile phones come out, the nifty cameras we tuck in our handbags and our SLR's in all their whizz bang glory and we snap away, in an effort to preserve a memory we want to keep fresh, how many of us actually go and have these printed? Archaic??? Is that the view? Well what happens when technology overcomes our current methods of photo storage and we can no longer access our pics? Like trying to watch a Beta video on a Blue Ray player I imagine.
Call me old fashioned but I love flicking through actual photo's, especially with others who were there or maybe didn't even know you then... It feeds ones soul to remember so crisply, reminded in vivid, un-embelished, albeit two dimensional truth. And most recently I have taken great joy in looking at childhood photos of me and my siblings, admiring the family resemblance in our own children. How unfortunate if our own children are not able to enjoy such a simple pleasure.
So last night I started on a mission to create a folder of photos I want to print off, some to frame, some to scrapbook and some just to flick through every now and then because I would be devastated to lose them because of a technological meltdown.
What I discovered while looking through the pics is how insanely quickly Jaz has grown up in the last 18 months. I often say she is growing up way too fast but to see the transformation in vivid colour, on the screen in front of me it bought tears to my eyes. I stared in wonderment as I looked at baby photos of Jaz and noticed just how similar her and Kayde are, and I amazed myself by remembering exactly how I felt at certain times just by a quick glance at a photo.
I may have many of my photos backed up, published on facebook and displayed in a digital frame but I am really looking forward to holding the prints in my hot little hand, the hard part has been narrowing the list down from the many thousands of shots I have taken over the past three years. One thing is for sure, I have enough of Jaz sleeping in odd and uncomfortable looking positions to make a killer wall display at her 21st!!!