My family takes lots of pictures each year that are never seen. It is so easy to press that button, but so hard to do much more. Recently we’ve seen tremendous growth in websites dedicated to helping photographers “share “photos with others. For a price, these sites will print the photo on paper or even novelty items like coffee cups. I have never taken advantage of these sites for printing, though, as I am averse to the shipping cost. Other sites, such as Wal-Mart, have eliminated shipping costs by allowing a user to send photos for printing to a particular store.
As an alternative, I have played with Windows Movie Maker, Google’s Picasa and Apple’s iMovie to burn photo slide shows to disks. This has been useful for sharing groups of photos with friends. I am not sure, based on my experience, that these shows are ever watched more then once.
A tradition we began a few years ago was to create an annual family calendar. Basically a 13 page calendar (12 months plus 1 front page) can display ~60 of the best photos from the previous year. Selecting the best becomes part of the fun. I was happy to see at least a few of the photos escaping their digital confines. I save the calendars at the end of the year as a somewhat floppy photo album.
Anidea that recently caught my eye is the vanity press reengineered for our digital age. Stephen Wildstrom, author of Technology & You for BusinessWeek, recently described Blurb’s BookSmart software and publishing. For as little as $20, an author can capture a collection of photos, blogs or other assets in a professional book. I think this could be a great and relatively inexpensive way to capture and share an important event with others.
I’ll have to tell my wife we need a coffee table – we’ll need someplace to share these books! With a little creative effort, vacations, weddings and other celebrations can be memorialized in an accessible format.
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Stephen H. Wildstron (2008), “So You Want to Publish That Novel,” BusinessWeek, January 9, downloaded Feb. 22, 2008 from http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_03/b4067000256155.htm?chan=technology_tech+maven+page+-+new_digital+entertainment