Pictures of your trips
 

As I am printing,croping, pasting, writing, etc. for the photo album of our recent trip, I wonder, why?? Do I look at it 2 years later? What do you do - Do you keep them in your computer. Have you ever gone on a great vacation and not taken pictures and then were sorry you didn't and why were you sorry? Does anyone care about them but the person who took the trip? It's a lot of work and expense. Maybe next time I will just enjoy the places and forget the camera....what do you think??

SHAR - I am not all computer literate and have just learnt how do do all this copying & pasting thing for our family newsletter. This letter is sent out three or four times a year and welcomes all family members to contribute any kind of news. As I have just been to Namibia for two weeks I wrote a little story with photos of the trip for other family to read. It gets burned onto a CD and put on the shelf for my childrens children or who ever, to view sometime in the future. They can ditch it if they want to but at least it may give them a laugh!

Shar- My travel scrapbooks are my favorite. Every year is our "big" trip and I crop/scrap them as well as send out the top 12 pics to e-friends and family plus, all family and travel photos in the PC have been set up to be our screen saver so I see all of my pictures scrolling by. Being a crazy type A personality, thumbing through my scrapbooks once in a while gives me a breather and a smile!

I also love the pictures of my grandparents in the late 40's on a trip to New York City and my in-law's 1963 camper trip across the USA. The history of the clothes, cars, the burma-shave signs, the hair styles. Just glad I have them.

Okay Shar, the type A must have a moment...please tell me that if you are making a live book (not a digital one) that you are using acid free, archival safe album, paper, adhesive etc. so that after all the work, time and expense your pics will last and not fade!

There are always 'the pictures that got away', the ones where the train passed a tree that blocked the view, or the animal moved, or whatever...

I do have albums of the best prints over the years, and, yes, I do look at them, but I think there's a peak-and-trough effect with even the best pictures - fascinating for the first few days, boring for a while, and then after a year or two they settle into a happy reminiscence phase. After 10-15 years there's a fascination from the memories that are jogged (or not): who on earth is that person who seems to be my best friend in the picture? why did I/he/she think those clothes/that hairdo a good idea? Not to mention all the family memories (oh, the agonies of family holidays in adolescence) that are brought back.

I've just bought a digital camera and it's finally stirred me into scanning old slides and negatives (for Paris, the most recently-visited place - heaven knows if I'll really keep this up for all the old pics). The results are quite fascinating. I think I'm likely to rely on digital storage - and probably display. It may well be that the boxes of old prints will eventually disappear as they fade away.

Now then, I'm sure I did a real scrapbook/diary for my very first trip in 1963, which should help explain some of the blurrier old shots - if only I can remember where it is....

I have my favorites on my computer and Windows screensaver set to use them as a slideshow so frequently I come back to a desk with the monitor flashing photos of an incredibly scenic shot or favorite dinners with friends or people met while traveling who have endeared themselves to me in a short period of time. Try it! You'll like it!

The enjoyment of my trip is in 3 equal phases; the planning, the going, and the photo gallery after I get home. I would never consider giving up the any of those pleasures.

I take lots of pics with my digital camera. I upload them to Snapfish and share them with friend and family. I also order prints but put only the best few in a photo album (the others in a photo box). That way when people want to see our pics we just give them that to look at. We know most people just want to see the highlights not every single rock I thought was pretty.

<b>DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!</b>

At this point in the history of writable optical media (CD, DVD), it is <i>unknown</i> how long they will preserve data.

Evidence is mounting that the dye layer that the bits are written on can deteriorate over time, and some brands tend to be worse than others. The best strategy seems to be to write multiple copies of important data to media made by several different manufacturers.

The first thing that I do with travel photos( after loading them on my computer) is to burn them on a DVD and label the DVD...for example ...Italy 2005 Raw. Thoes are the imagesa straight out of my camera...with no modifications of any kind. My safety backup.

Obviously, I also make backups of any modified or adjusted photos...on a separate backup.

That's the way to do it, Dick.

If you're shooting digital, the first thing you should do is make a CD or a DVD of the original, unaltered shots.

For your final adjusted photos, take them to some place like Costco or Walmat and have them make prints AND burn a CD for you. Don't make your own prints because they will eventually fade. A qualified photo processor uses a true photographic (chemical) process to print your images, as opposed to an inkjet (printer) process.

Your prints should last just as long as prints from film. Your &quot;negative&quot; is now your CD or DVD. If you're worried about them lasting, make new copies every few years.

It's a personal choice if you want to take pictures or not. Some folks will enjoy seeing them, others won't.

It doesn't have to be an all or nothing proposition. Carry a small digital camera with you and just take a few personal photo mementos.

I don't leave the camera behind completely, but I DO have an extremely simple system. And I would never bother making albums, etc. I take only a couple rolls of film withusing disposable cameras or a point&amp;shoot, i ick up postcards of major sites or kitchy ones with the country name or map.

When I get home I print them 4X6 and make a bundle with the country and the year on an index card at the front, rubber band 'em &amp; file the packs away in a basket of appropriate shape. So I can pull out a particular trip for reference or to show someone who's interested.

I have more photo albums than I can count. Built bookshelves for the express purpose of having a place to keep them. The last several years I have started including in my trip albums all sorts of things from the trip, not just photos. Maps, theater programs, cards from restaurants and shops, metro tickets, brochures from places I have visited. I love to look at them. There are times that I do not feel inspired to take pictures, and times that I consciously forget the camera, but I really treasure the photos I have taken over the years.

Thanks for the suggestions on dumping them onto a DVD as a back up and then sending them out to be printed for final pictures. I have been printing them on my inkjet and never thougth much about it fading. It isn't cheap to print your own but the advantage is that you can crop, resize, enhance or change the color, etc. We do enjoy looking at our old trips and especially enjoy seeing how much better our &quot;eye&quot; has become thru the years but the storage is becoming an issue so I appreciate all the suggestions. However, I am now 2 years behind in getting my family photo's in a book!

One of the best suggestions I have ever read is to get your most recent photos into albums first. If you wait to catch up with the ones from two years ago, you will never get around to it.

Shar, take your CD (or camera memory) to the nearest store that has a digital photo printing station. The Walgreen's up the street from us has a Kodak machine that allows you to crop, enlarge, rotate, de-redeye - in short, every manipulation you can want. Their usual price is 29&cent;, but frequent specials bring it down to 20&cent;. If you're a Costco member, you can do the same thing on their web site. For 17&cent;.

My father (for whom I created my screen name!) was an avid photographer when my sister and I were growing up in the 1960s. He took many pictures (black and white), developed them himself, and mounted them in black-paged albums. Each album was numbered on the spine. Years later when my sister and I were adults and would return home for a visit with my parents, we'd sit side-by-side on the couch and pore over those photo albums of us growing up - Christmases, birthdays, summer picnics, and yes, vacations - our family travels all over the US in a small camper. Those albums provided numerous evenings of shared memories. Both our parents are now deceased. My sister lives in Colorado and I in Maryland. She has those albums in safe-keeping at her place. I just got back from visiting her - and yes - we got out the albums while I was there. We had gone to Milner Pass in Rocky Mountain National Park and had someone take a picture of us at the continental divide sign because my sister remembered that Dad had taken our picture there about 35 years ago when we were kids. So we then went back to her place to see if we could find it in the album... and yup, sure enough, there it was! Me with totally white-blonde hair and my big sister - almost a foot taller than me (she's 8 years older - now we're the same height). So... in answer to your question... family members will look at those photo albums years later with much fondness and joy. Be sure a fair number of your pictures include family members in them, not just the sites themselves. It's the pictures of us as kids that we love looking at. If you have loved ones along on the trip, by all means, don't leave the camera at home!
Karen (of the now-famous &quot;bottoms&quot; posting)

I am a picture person and have bookshelves of albums. My grandchildren love to look at them and are always asking to see their parents when they were young, etc. Now that we travel, not only do I make albums, but I load my pictures onto webshots. When we go to an interesting place, my friends and relatives request that I send them the webshots, and we can all enjoy the scenery. I travel with two digital cameras and one video and enjoy them all! When I exercise on my treadmill, I watch the videos and the trips come right back!!

Now that'd be the next big multi-media must-have: room-size wrap-around projection for your videos so that you can imagine you're jogging through the landscape (plus appropriate atmospheric sound and smelly-vision....)

Viewing my travel photos from the website I use is what gets me through the work day.....they remind me why I need a paycheck. I cannot imagine traveling without a camera - for memories, for painting references, and for forcing me to really see where I am visiting.

I was given a digital camera as a gift and have to say that I thoroughly enjoy it! We used it to take pictures at our son's wedding and found it really fun to be able to check and see if a photo turned out fine.

Just did not know about a feature on the camera, and I imagine that all cameras have it, -- setting it to best photo right off the start. Our setting was on a medium photo and when we printed it out it did not have the quality we liked. When we found out about it, we immediately changed it to &quot;best&quot; and the photo are printed better.

On a new camera, always check the settings before you start to use it. Hope I've helped others.

I like Dick's suggestion of labeling his CD with date and the description - - &quot;RAW&quot;. I guess that's what us first time users need, some advice on Albums and storage.

I've got years and years of photos that need to be sorted and placed in albums, or scanned to computer. Will need to learn more about scanning. Happy picture taking to you all.