I enjoy documenting my life in one way or another! From high school all the way through college and my pre-marriage days I journaled almost every single day, inspired by the Diary of Anne Frank. Back then, time was not scarce. I used to sit hours on end sometimes penning down every single detail of that day – the weather, what happened in class, who cracked what joke, what I had for tea, what I did, how I felt, so on and so forth! Had my friends passed some funny chit to me in class, I would save it for my journal and stick it! Some of my friends had a great sense of humor and the clues they would write for the chrisma-chris child game used to be so hilarious, each ended up in my journal!

In the meantime, I would also faithfully collect and preserve photographs of me. A digital camera did not exist back in my school and early college days. So be it a class photograph or event photograph I would immediately pay and buy my copy.

That AC smell of the Konica Color Lab my dad used to take me in Trichy is still so fresh in my mind. How I used to eagerly wait to pick our printed photographs!

During my college years, my friends and I would make it a point to hangout with the ones who had a camera and make sure we are there in every single picture 😉

By the time I got married, I had seven massive journals! Although I attempted to journal post-marriage, I could not keep up with the new routine and lack of time! But I am glad I at least got to record one of the best phases of my life!

Since I could not continue to journal, I switched to photography and blogging! Hubby gifted me my first camera and that was the very first gift he gave me! I am not a great photographer or writer, but I began to capture all my happy moments and try my best to blog about it!

At times when I read other blogs and compare mine, I feel my writing skills are very inadequate and basic. But then I remind myself that it is for me I write. The pictures I capture are for me to treasure.

In the year 2012, I took up a Project365 capturing every day of that year in pictures. When I started the project, I had no clue that God will surprise us with a trip to the UK! So I enjoyed documenting our five month stay there! You can find those pics here!

Back when we were using roll cameras, we had no choice but to print our photographs to see how each of those 36 photographs turned out. With the dawn of digital cameras and smartphones, we can now take countless number of pics without having to print them out!

However, very sadly all those pics end up on our computers and hard-disks. The lucky few make it to Facebook and Instagram. One or two make it as wallpapers on our laptops and mobile phones. The rest of the pics and along with it those memories soon become long forgotten merely existing as jpg files!

I read somewhere that,

We are the most photographed generation, yet the ones who least enjoy it!

As for me, I enjoy the perks of all the technological advancements available and affordable. BUT when it comes to letters and photographs, email or a digital pic can never satisfy me! Until two years ago, I had pen pals and I wrote snail mails. No email or WhatsApp message can replace the thrill of writing and receiving a letter by post! The same with printed photographs!

For me each photograph is a piece of my life frozen in time. A priceless memory. No matter how much I hope, wish or pray, I can never turn back time and relive that exact moment. It is priceless!

I print them because I can feel them and I get to see them a lot more often than when it is a jpg file on the computer. One of the many moments I enjoy with my girls as well as my family and friends is going through an album and talking about those memories! It is a wonderful feeling!

Thanks to sites like Zoomin and Vistaprint, that I can not only print photographs, but get personalized and customized albums! It may be a little time consuming designing every page and arranging each photo, but once it arrives, its absolutely worth it! I make sure I make albums of our vacations, our daughters birthdays and each year whenever I find time!

To this day, when I go to my parents house, I enjoy going through my childhood albums. My mom was and is very passionate about photography (probably that’s how it rubbed off on me) and has a good collections of our photographs. I personally feel, our children deserve the same privileged!

We have the choice of giving our children their photographs either on DVDs, Hard-disks, Cloud (God knows what more will be invented!)… Or as printed albums! There is a great chance of a DVD or Hard-disk to be misplaced or stop working. A greater chance of the cloud link to get lost among the emails and documents! A higher chance of our children living in a day and age when a DVD and hard-disk could be out-dated and unusable 😉

Hence my choice would always be an album! I want my girls to have the same joy of reliving their years in pictures!

That’s why I print my photographs 🙂