Memories are precious, treat them with respect.

My Grandma is an amazing woman, she’s very kind, and generous and is my last surviving Grandparent. I do love her dearly. Something that amazes me about her is her photo collection. She has THOUSANDS of photos, literally THOUSANDS, from when she was a child, right up until the present day. They stretch across volumes of photo albums, and are all sorted and organised, in order. If you recall a birthday, or an event from the family past, she’s got a photo of it – incredible.

Me and my sister – off of the 80’s

A few years ago I was mildly panicked that I didn’t have any photos of me when I was little, or indeed much younger. My mum went through her collection and pulled out a few hundred spanning me as a baby, to me as a gangly teenager. I’ve slowly started scanning them all in so I have them digitally, and will add them to my Picasa album. It’s so nice to have them though, looking back at where we used to live, where we went on holiday, all our old friends, relatives who have passed away.

These are all precious memories.

I take a lot of photos, some months I’ll take several hundred, on average month it is between 50-100, Why? Well I love photos. I really do. I want to keep them all like my grandma has, perhaps, not in printed albums, but electronically, with several backups ‘just in case’. Digital photography has improved so much in the last 5 years, storage is cheap, so there really isn’t any reason not to build an archive of your life.

One of my favourite pics of G.
Taken on an N95!

Something that irks me somewhat are shit photos, I don’t mean as in out of focus, or blurry. That happens to the best of us! I mean the sort of photos your low end Blackberry takes, or a shit Nokia. of course people take more photographs on their phones these days. Pretty much all phones have a camera – BUT – a lot of them are shit.

I’ve always tried to have phones with decent cameras, from my trusty Nokia N95, to my shiny Galaxy S2 they do have great cameras, and can take a decent high res photo, and for the cost of them I expect that.

The problem is, a lot of people either don’t think, or don’t care about their photos and just snap away with their shit phone camera. Important life changing events, lost forever in a noisy, grainy, shitty shots.
Stop – please – STOP!

These are photographs that you’ll probably look back on when you’re 80 and think ‘fuck – I wish I used a better camera’.

A better camera isn’t expensive, just before we went away on honeymoon I picked up a Canon IXOS 105 – it didn’t cost all that much (circa £70) – it takes a cracking photo, and it should last me a few years. I can carry it out and about because it’s TINY and the battery lasts for ages. Perfect.

My £70 IXOS 105 – It takes a good photo *shame about the idiot in the photo*

I’ve obviously nothing against shit phone cameras, they are great for catching a silly moment, or for a bit of fun, and sending the results off to Facebook, fine.

Using them solely for every single snap?

No, seriously, stop it please!

Just remember your children will see these photos one day, heck, even their children will see them, make a smallish investment and give them something decent to look at.