Let’s Talk About Digital Files….

…..and why printed photographs are so important

I can understand why you would like to have digital files. But I wouldn’t be serving you well, if I didn’t explain the downsides of digitals and why printed photographs are so important.

I have been a photographer all my life. I started photographing with film and when digital photography was invented I bought my first ever digital camera in 2001.

I remember being so excited. I had 4 little children, and until then, I had been using my film camera to document their lives. But often the costs were a little high for me to print all the photos. It involved sending them a way to a professional lab, and that cost time and money. But I can remember the feeling of excitement when the postman delivered a package with prints. 

The kids would be beside themselves with joy, as we’d gather around the kitchen table and spread them all out and remember what a fabulous time we’d had, just by looking at the pictures. I would frame some of them, and the rest went into a huge box. I still have that big box of prints. 

The process of getting to the point of having prints was easy. Put a film in the camera, take pictures, take the film out, and send it to a lab. Wait a week, and the prints were in my hand. (If only that was the case now)

I always wished I could take more photos, but developing and printing costs money, so I limited myself to special occasions. 

When I got my first professional digital camera, I was thrilled to be able to take as many pictures as I wanted.

Now all I had to do was put in a memory card, take some beautiful photos, and then spend hours and hours and hours, uploading, downloading, backing-up and then skillfully editing, until eventually I would have a lovely picture. 

I even went to college and did a degree to learn how to do all this. So instead of a huge box of prints, I started collecting digital images on floppy disc (don’t laugh, this was state of the art in 2001!).

Then I bought a better camera and  floppy discs became obsolete. Now it was all very fancy with CD’s to store my files. That was fantastic, until the CDs began to fail as they don’t last for ever. Anyway by this time I was using DVDs to store my family photos. This was going to be the new storage medium, very possibly for all eternity.

Roll on a few years. I moved house several times, each time lugging the giant box of family prints with me. 

As phones got better cameras, I began to only use my professional camera for actual paid work. It was so much easier to use my phone and I could look at my pictures whenever I wanted to. That is, until I lost my phone. I had meant to back it up, but had never actually got around to doing that.

I was working as a wedding photographer by now, and had moved on, from delivering wedding photos to the couple on DVD, (because weirdly that wasn’t the storage medium to last for generations) by now it was USB ( I think, I actually can’t keep up) 

Do you see where I am going with this story? 

Printed photographs will last you a lifetime. They won’t get lost in a sea of a zillion photos, and you’ll never be unable to see them, because they will never be in the wrong type of memory stick, and they won’t be on The Cloud, when, one day, that breaks. And yes that is possible. No cyber attack, is ever going to destroy your printed portraits. 

All printed photographs, that you receive from Mabel & Møøse, whether they are mounted prints, framed wall portraits or canvases, are all printed by the best professional photographic printers. They use true colours and inks that last. When you take a digital file to a high street printer, your beautiful baby may well turn out looking a little green.  It certainly won’t look as good as a professionally printed image and the way that it was intended to look. 

Most people who only receive digital files from their photographer, never end up printing them out. After the initial rush of sharing them on your socials, they lie on a hard drive or in the cloud and at best you never look at them again. At worst you lose them forever.

This is why Mabel & Møøse is very much a print based studio. We cater for families who want photographs for their own families enjoyment. To keep in a beautiful box, preserved forever or professionally framed to decorate your home. 

This is why Mabel & Møøse doesn’t ever supply digital files on their own. They do come included with some of the higher collections, as we understand that you do want to share them with your friends and family, but ultimately we want you to be able to enjoy professional portraits of your babies in your own home and we want those portraits to still be around when your children have grown up. 

If you love my Scandi-syle of baby photography and are ready to book a photoshoot for your baby then click the button below.