Here we are …. the first day of Spring, at long last. This was just a horrible winter, and for the folks in the mid-West it is still creating problems. As the earth rotates, Spring is rolling in across the globe. In my patch of the world it is supposed to arrive sometime between 1:30 and 1:35 this afternoon. Even better news is that we will be having temperatures to match it, expected to be around 72º.
I was reading an article the other day written by Caitlin McDevitt from Slate (no link) about the growing trend of people posting their photos online now instead of printing them out and saving/sending them to friends and relatives. With the advent of the digital camera and the refinements that allow the casual users to download their photos directly onto their computer, the drug store photo print service is rapidly starving to death. In 2008 there were approximately 63 billion photos printed out worldwide, but the number is dropping rapidly. It is now estimated that 40% of households that own digital cameras no longer print out any pictures, instead they are uploading them to online photo albums like Flickr, Photobucket, and especially Facebook.
Worldwide, there are 400 million users uploading about 3 billion photos per month, and about 65% of them are using Facebook to do it. But this trend is also creating a new phenomenon that will have some negative consequences in the long run. You see, many of these people are using these online social websites as their default storage facility for their photos. They download them onto Facebook, for example, and then they clear the memory card in their camera leaving the website as the sole depository of their images. What they do not realize they are doing, is storing a seriously degraded copy of their image that will not be able to be printed out.
The average amateur home photographer is used to the old way of having a film negative of their pictures that is always able to be copied and has a high degree of clarity and sharpness that allows it to be enlarged to, say 5″ by 7″ which is large enough to put in a picture frame and set on the table or mantle for display. Unless they are among the very few who have taken the time and effort to learn about this new photo storage method of using pixels on a digital medium, they are unaware of the concept of photo resolution, the number of pixels packed into a square-inch of display medium. The higher the number of pixels per sq. in., the higher the resolution and the better able you are to enlarge the photo without creating pixelation or blurryness.
When your photo is first stored in your camera, it usually has a fairly high resolution depending on the size of the camera (3 Mp camera vs. a 10 Mp camera, for example). And if you download that original image onto your computer and preferably burn it to a CD-ROM, you retain that higher resolution and with it the ability to print out a large copy for sharing or display. But when you download the images to a social network, they are greatly degraded in resolution so that the main servers can store the billions of images that are being sent their way. When you take an image that has 3 Mb worth of digital information on it and compress it down to a mere 120 Kb of information, you get an image that might look fine on a computer screen, but will not withstand the enlargement to a physical print that you can mail to Grandma. And as for transferring your Facebook photo album onto your tv screen (a growing practice), forget about it. You’ll just get a collection of pixelated goop.
So keep that in mind whenever you take a series of digital photos that you might want to save for posterity. Transfer your original images to a CD-ROM because once you wipe your memory card, they will be gone forever…..no negatives to pass along to the next generations.
And now we need to pass along the equipment check sheets for today, so let’s get started with that. I’ll go make some more coffee.
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