Photos

Honors Humanities 2
Mr. Bowers
9 March 2011
A Moment in Time
    Photography is an amazing thing. It gives you the ability to solidify a moment in your life, weather it be a happy, sad or frightening time. Photos give one the freedom to express yourself with emotion through the colors, size and focus of the photo. You can bring it one step higher by gathering these memories and scattering them into a photo album. There are so many ways one could personalize their photos to really create it their own. All you need is a few household objects to create your own album. You will need a purpose, camera, computer, printer (or access to a store, whatever your preference), a photo album.
    When people create photo albums, they always have some sort of meaning behind their photos weather they know it or not. Although this purpose may not be present in their minds at the beginning of album-making, there’s always a reason why they put their time into creating one. Without purpose, there would be no reason to make a photo album in the first place. But, there are many reasons to create one, such as remembering your past once you become a senor citizen in a old persons home or going off to college to briefly relive your childhood and past home. You may take photos to remember old friends or relatives, or to show the beauty of a place you once traveled. One may put together a photo album with no meaning at all, and end up with huge meaning. Whatever the reason, (mostly) everyone finds it enjoyable, and sometimes even humorous to flip through the pages of the past. So, the first step in creating a photo album is to have purpose.
    The second step involves fetching your camera, and if you don’t have one, I would urge you to invest some money to but one as it’s fairly important in the album-creating process. It was during the year of 1991 when Kodak released the first digital camera which held a whopping 1.3 mega pixels (!) and they’ve getting increasingly cheaper and more advanced throughout the years. So go out and buy one if you haven’t already!
    Now, go out and take some pictures! Put yourself into an interesting surrounding. Personally, this is the funnest step as you get to go out there and have some fun. If you’re taking photos of your friends, you can go crazy and see that through the photos in the future. Have a good time, because nobody wants to stare at photos that remind them of a horrible day, unless that‘s what you‘re aiming for. The photo-taking process can span from a day to a decade even, depending on the purpose. Play with angles and lighting to add a bit of yourself to the photos. 60 years from now, what kind of things would you wish to go back and see from your youth? While taking photos, think, “What intrigues me?” and snap a photo. Taking photos is like writing in a journal. You do it to remember, and like writing in a journal, it can definitely relieve some stress. It’s really great how fun and simple this activity is.
    The rest of the process is relatively simple. Download these photos onto your computer, which should only take a few minutes. From past experience, you may want to fish through your photos and delete any that have no use to you. This simplifies the amount and gives more importance to the golden photos. Send these photos of your to a store such as Walgreens or Wal-Mart to be printed and wait for a few hours to pick them up. Wal-mart is the cheaper of the two, and that’s why I use them usually. They give you a choice of printing them with a glossy (which is shiny and smooth), or matte/luster (which is slightly rough, but doesn’t attract finger prints) cover. I personally would recommend glossy for albums because they appear slightly more crisp and colorful. The photos will be going into an album anyways, so it won’t get that many finger prints. You could also print double or more to hand out to people who may enjoy a couple of extras.
    Once you proudly have this stack of photos, bring it home to lay out. It depends on your personal style (and, again, purpose), but you could either slip the photos into the book in the order they were taken, or spread them out on the floor to look at. Most people will chose the first option, but it can add some interest to the album if you mix the photos up. For example, if you took a large number of flower pictures, you could spread them out throughout the album.
    Voila! You have a photo album, available to flip through anytime through your life. Albums can bring comfort and joy to many people, if it’s at a family gathering, wedding, funeral, or maybe in a new home far away from your parents. Why create a photo album? For whatever reason you wish. It’s such a simple process, the question should be “Why not create an album?”. Good luck!