I used to always be taking pictures of my own children. They were my always available models and my proving ground; however as I do more and more photography for others I haven’t been taking as many pictures of them as usual. This weekend it felt like summer had arrived, so as a family we went to a local park to let the children run around and enjoy themselves in the unexpected good weather. I just so happened to have some camera gear in my car so the camera came also. At the park I saw a load of other people taking pictures and capturing their children running around and having fun. As a nation we must have a huge archive of our children growing up; however what do we do with them? Are these pictures destined to be lost due to hard disk failure when the laptop fails or lost along with the mobile phone that took them. Everything is digital now, taken in digital and stored in digital and digital is fantastic, up to the point that it fails, and it will. I have just replaced a failed hard disk on my computer where I had stored somewhere in the region of 30,000 images, that would have been a disaster if I had not already planned for such an eventuality.  I use two hard disks in my computer which are a mirror image of each other (Raid 1) this meant that I could simply swap my broken disk out for a new working one with no drama and no losses. On top of that I always hold a backup on an external storage device and another copy off site, so I think my pictures are fairly secure, but I wonder about everyone else’s. So everyone thinks the digital age allows everyone to photograph and capture every moment for generations to come; however will hard disk failure wipe them out. Anyone remembering pre digital will no doubt have a shoe box full of printed pictures and these will are not reliant on being stored as a string of 0’s and 1’s on a magnetic disk, these will stand the test of time. the digital age may be here but there is still a real case for the printed image in order to preserve our images.

I think I will go an place a print order now 🙂