Your Smartphone is Destroying Your Heritage

We live in a world where almost everything is done with our computer, laptops, tablets, or smartphone.  From booking tickets to making friendships, the digital medium is being preferred more and more.

But does that hold true for photographs, too? Well, thanks to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and other various social media networks, people have the option to upload their photos onto their favorite social media platform and rely solely on them for friends and family to see and save these images. 

Not that there is anything wrong with uploading your memories online, in fact, if nothing, it makes things so convenient! Especially if you’re a military family and you have family members living in other parts of the United States and sometimes in other places of the world, social media is rather convenient.  You can now share your photos with people from all over the world and that is all great, but there are some drawbacks to this as well.

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You may think that having a backup of all your photographs on your smartphone or your computer is an end-all solution to everything, but is it really? Can we really depend on these electronic devices to sustain our backup and let that be the end of it?

• No, this is not the end.
  

What if you lose your smartphone?  What if your pictures become corrupt or you get your phone wet or dare I say it, drop and break your smartphone?

What if a virus corrupts your laptop or computer and you end up losing all your files, including your favorite photographs!

So makes sense why you would want to have hard-copies of your favorite photographs even in the digital age. Getting your photographs printed means that you have a forever sort of backup that you can depend on that no virus can possibly corrupt.

A picture is something that truly lasts forever. You may have hundreds and hundreds of pictures showcasing your favorite moments, your favorite people, favorite possessions so why would you want to risk all of this by not getting any hard-copies made!  One of the most amazing things happened to me this past fall.  I flew to Los Angeles for my favorite Aunt's funeral.  She was like a Mom…it was that special of a relationship.  One of the things I enjoyed the most during this horrible time, was going back and looking at pictures she had kept and stored.

There were so many albums and loose pictures she had kept for years.  I even found one of myself when I was a young girl, my high school graduation photo, and my first Air Force uniform portrait.  Looking back at those pictures was like going back and getting in a time machine.  While looking at the pictures, we didn’t have to pass phones, or pull in any electronic device; we just looked at the pictures.  There was a lot of laughing, smiles, and sadness because of the great person that was lost. 

And the fact that printing photographs is not something that is super expensive, there is no reason why anybody should be reluctant in getting them done. Once you have them with you, you can arrange all your favorite photos in beautiful albums too or hanging on the walls of your home.

I understand that we are living in the digital age, but that does not mean we should completely abandon some of our old-school habits especially those related to photography!

So, do not take the risk of just uploading your favorite photographs online and possibly losing them all, but instead have their hard-copies made too.

You never know when you just might need them! Get your printed photographs today and have the beautiful moments that you have captured on camera stay with you forever.  Give your future generations something they can hold on to forever, something which cannot be easily deleted, lost, or can only be looked at by turning on an electronic device.

Tamieka Smith is a Northern Virginia Photographer in Woodbridge, Virginia.

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