WELCOME! Thank you for dropping by!
I've always loved photos - often quietly looking through albums as a kid. It helped me warmly remember special events and feel the love around me. On my 12th birthday, I was given a camera of my very own. Game on!
Now it's easy to feel overwhelmed because of the thousands of photos on our phones, cameras & computers! I'm here to help!
Let me know how I can help YOU enjoy your photos!
Blessings, Margaret Bommarito
[email protected]
PS: I also create CUSTOM PROJECTS for clients who are NOT interested in Doing-It-Themselves!
Projects include: Scanning, Photo Restoration, Photo Books, Invitations, Cards, Programs, Table Numbers, Word Art, & More
Word art website links: Digital Creations by M AND Digital Creations by M2
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What type of help do you need?!?!?!
1. PRINTED PHOTOS
"It sounds really weird as a computer scientist saying this, but if they're photos you really, really want your grandchildren to see, PRINT THEM out."
Ethan Miller, the Symantec presidential chair in storage and security at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
B. SLIDE-IN ALBUMS
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ENJOY & PROTECT your photos in a beautiful 11x14 POCKET ALBUM! Just slip them in! <Click on photo
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2. DIGITAL IMAGES
We LOVE digital photos because of the people & places in them and the memories they preserve. The challenge today is the QUANTITY & VULNERABILITY of digital photos!
A. ORGANIZING
& EDITING B. CREATE
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Overwhelmed by the QUANTITY? HISTORIAN Software keeps ALL your photos in ONE PLACE and automatically ORGANIZES them by date. Automatically BACKS THEM UP, too! (Also has amazing EDITING tools! Ex: Before & After) NOTE: Historian™ runs only on supported versions of Microsoft Windows. It will not run under MacOS. However, if you are running a supported version of Windows on your Mac using one of the available tools, such as Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion, you can run Historian. <Click on PHOTO or HISTORIAN tab at TOP of page. Create all kinds of FUN photo projects with ARTISAN Software! Photo books, invitations, gifts, banners, cards, posters, & more! NOTE: Artisan® runs only on supported versions of Microsoft Windows. It will not run under MacOS. However, if you are running a supported version of Windows on your Mac using one of the available tools, such as Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion, you can run Artisan. <Click on PHOTO or ARTISAN tab at TOP of page For quality PRINTING of your digital projects, go to Forever's PRINT SHOP!
Click on PRINT SHOP tab at top of page |
OUR PHOTOS:
We LOVE photos because of the people & places in them and the memories they preserve. The challenge today is the QUANTITY & VULNERABILITY of digital photos! I urge you to regularly choose your favorites and most meaningful photos and have them printed.
The SIMPLEST next step would be to SLIP them into pocket pages in an album (11x14 Pocket Album OR 12x12 Bookcloth Album with Multi Pocket Pages- both available from CM (Creative Memories)
Blessings, Margaret
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A generation robbed of childhood memories?
Reflections may be lost to the cyber world
I heard a dire prediction of what will become of this most photographed generation of children in history. It didn't have to do with the potential psychological impact of being hyper-documented, although those are legitimate worries.
"The irony is that kids will end up with little visual documentation of their childhood because it will be lost to the cyber world," said David Carson, one of the Post-Dispatch's Pulitzer Prize-winning photography staffers. He's also the father of a much-photographed 9-year-old daughter.
"They are going to lose all this history," he said. Technology changes so quickly, it renders older formats obsolete. Quantity overtakes quality. Performance - mugging and posing for the camera - replaces capturing candid moments. And the risk of losing it all takes less than a house fire or natural disaster: a technological glitch, a lost phone not backed up, a corrupted hard drive.
It's the paradox of the times we live in: Our children grow up with hundreds of thousands of photographs of their childhoods, yet so few they will hold or carry with them.
We rely on our visual documentation as our memory for when it fades.
But the physical experience of revisiting memories has changed. The boxes of photographs stashed in the closet or envelopes shoved in drawers are replaced by albums on social media or camera rolls on our phones. Scrolling through pictures on a screen is viscerally different from thumbing through them in an album or box. At some point, your eyes glaze over digital pixels.
Part of the problem is sheer volume. In the olden days of film (when I was growing up) taking a photo had to be more deliberate and conscious rather than reflexive. The camera came out on birthdays, holidays and vacations. When digital cameras eliminated the cost of film, floodgates opened. Consumers are expected to take 1 trillion photos this year, according to InfoTrends' 2014 Worldwide Image Capture Forecast. More than 740 billion of those images will be taken using smartphones.
It's not unusual for parents to have thousands of digital images of their children from a single year.
Photo editing is hard. "You don't get rid of bad pictures," Carson said. "People rarely value a picture enough to print it out."
But as much as we like to believe in the promise of forever in the cloud, veteran photographers are skeptical. Carson doubts whether he can still open pictures he made on a digital camera 15 years ago because the technology has changed so much.
Of course, hard copy photographs are susceptible to fires and floods, but so are hard drives. As recent hacking scandals brought to light, there are privacy concerns in the ether.
He also wonders about he quality of popular photo book services. Check the archival quality of photo printing services to see if the books ordered online will hold up decades down he line. (NOTE: Stitched bindings, archival quality pages are VITAL to longevity. Panstoria Print Shop uses archival-quality premium satin paper in all books & wire-stitched binding in their hardbound books.) Keep in mind that even CD's and DVD's go bad over time.
One photo editor said he had CD's from the late '90's that won't open anymore. New systems aren't equipped to read old formats.
Create an electronic archive and backup, but also take advantage of print deals. Carson suggests picking a few dozen photos that you respond to the most emotionally and printing those periodically. Throw them in a shoe box under the bed. (NOTE: Please NOT a shoe box - the cardboard attracts moisture and bugs. Polypropylene plastic is best - definitely NOT PVC. CM has a safe, archival quality sort box!) Or put them in an archival quality album.
Give hard drives as gifts. Back up the drive, and keep it in a different place. I store the negatives of my wedding photos in our bank safety deposit box.
And consider how much documentation of your own childhood you revisit.
Perhaps it is time to rethink the photographic legacy we want our children to inherit. I've decided to create four books or albums in a set for each of my children: One for babyhood, another for elementary school years, then middle school and lastly for high school.
This sort of collection seems so much more manageable than a hundred thousand digital images in a virtual gallery. I imagine we will store (and back up) all the excess images, as well, just in case we want to meander through a virtual attic one day.
It's a priceless gift to try to preserve the story of a person's life. It's about more than the process of clicking, sharing and gathering "likes."
Aisha Sultan, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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I recommend that you print your pictures frequently and in smaller batches. As we go through our day-to-day lives, remember to take lots of pictures and print them often!
*******************************************************************************************
A generation robbed of childhood memories?
Reflections may be lost to the cyber world
I heard a dire prediction of what will become of this most photographed generation of children in history. It didn't have to do with the potential psychological impact of being hyper-documented, although those are legitimate worries.
"The irony is that kids will end up with little visual documentation of their childhood because it will be lost to the cyber world," said David Carson, one of the Post-Dispatch's Pulitzer Prize-winning photography staffers. He's also the father of a much-photographed 9-year-old daughter.
"They are going to lose all this history," he said. Technology changes so quickly, it renders older formats obsolete. Quantity overtakes quality. Performance - mugging and posing for the camera - replaces capturing candid moments. And the risk of losing it all takes less than a house fire or natural disaster: a technological glitch, a lost phone not backed up, a corrupted hard drive.
It's the paradox of the times we live in: Our children grow up with hundreds of thousands of photographs of their childhoods, yet so few they will hold or carry with them.
We rely on our visual documentation as our memory for when it fades.
But the physical experience of revisiting memories has changed. The boxes of photographs stashed in the closet or envelopes shoved in drawers are replaced by albums on social media or camera rolls on our phones. Scrolling through pictures on a screen is viscerally different from thumbing through them in an album or box. At some point, your eyes glaze over digital pixels.
Part of the problem is sheer volume. In the olden days of film (when I was growing up) taking a photo had to be more deliberate and conscious rather than reflexive. The camera came out on birthdays, holidays and vacations. When digital cameras eliminated the cost of film, floodgates opened. Consumers are expected to take 1 trillion photos this year, according to InfoTrends' 2014 Worldwide Image Capture Forecast. More than 740 billion of those images will be taken using smartphones.
It's not unusual for parents to have thousands of digital images of their children from a single year.
Photo editing is hard. "You don't get rid of bad pictures," Carson said. "People rarely value a picture enough to print it out."
But as much as we like to believe in the promise of forever in the cloud, veteran photographers are skeptical. Carson doubts whether he can still open pictures he made on a digital camera 15 years ago because the technology has changed so much.
Of course, hard copy photographs are susceptible to fires and floods, but so are hard drives. As recent hacking scandals brought to light, there are privacy concerns in the ether.
He also wonders about he quality of popular photo book services. Check the archival quality of photo printing services to see if the books ordered online will hold up decades down he line. (NOTE: Stitched bindings, archival quality pages are VITAL to longevity. Panstoria Print Shop uses archival-quality premium satin paper in all books & wire-stitched binding in their hardbound books.) Keep in mind that even CD's and DVD's go bad over time.
One photo editor said he had CD's from the late '90's that won't open anymore. New systems aren't equipped to read old formats.
Create an electronic archive and backup, but also take advantage of print deals. Carson suggests picking a few dozen photos that you respond to the most emotionally and printing those periodically. Throw them in a shoe box under the bed. (NOTE: Please NOT a shoe box - the cardboard attracts moisture and bugs. Polypropylene plastic is best - definitely NOT PVC. CM has a safe, archival quality sort box!) Or put them in an archival quality album.
Give hard drives as gifts. Back up the drive, and keep it in a different place. I store the negatives of my wedding photos in our bank safety deposit box.
And consider how much documentation of your own childhood you revisit.
Perhaps it is time to rethink the photographic legacy we want our children to inherit. I've decided to create four books or albums in a set for each of my children: One for babyhood, another for elementary school years, then middle school and lastly for high school.
This sort of collection seems so much more manageable than a hundred thousand digital images in a virtual gallery. I imagine we will store (and back up) all the excess images, as well, just in case we want to meander through a virtual attic one day.
It's a priceless gift to try to preserve the story of a person's life. It's about more than the process of clicking, sharing and gathering "likes."
Aisha Sultan, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
*******************************************************************************************
I recommend that you print your pictures frequently and in smaller batches. As we go through our day-to-day lives, remember to take lots of pictures and print them often!
- The memories are fresh in your mind. Do you remember in the "film days" when you would come home from a vacation and rush out to the local photo lab to develop your film? You'd pay extra for the one-hour turnaround so that you could look at them once you got home even before you'd unpack. It was exciting and fun, and the memories were fresh in your head.
- It's obvious that printing more frequently is much less work than doing it in bulk a couple of times each year. You're more likely to look through the prints, put them on display and into albums if you have less to sift through. After all, no one wants to put a picture from Christmas up on the fridge in July!
- You can share the prints right away while the memories are fresh. You don't want to bring vacation pictures over to a friend's house from six months ago. If you bring over the pictures the day you get back from your vacation, you have something visual to show while you tell all the fun stories from the trip.
- There is less of a chance that the memory card will go corrupt or that you'll loose the digital pictures if you print them more often.
- One of our favorite things to do after the holidays, a trip or a get-together is to print duplicate copies of some of the pictures for friends and/or family who are in the pictures as well. We love to give them to them within 3-4 days so that they can enjoy the pictures while the memories are fresh in their minds.
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