Picture This: Changing our lives with digital photography

Photo Opportunity Knocks
Isn’t it amazing how digital photography has brought picture-taking and picture-sharing into a whole new era? Today, if I take a picture of my daughter leaving for school in the morning, I can upload it to my PC in the afternoon, and it can be viewed and enjoyed by family and friends – both near and far - before she’s through with her homework that night.

Instant pictures, with no wait for the film to be developed, are a giant leap forward from the days of dropping-off and picking-up film, paying for prints that will never see the light of day, and needing to return to the same crowded drug store or supermarket for enlargements and reprints. And that’s not even mentioning those pesky plastic negative strips that always seemed to take up miles of valuable space inside my cabinets and drawers. And I find that digital files are MUCH easier to keep in chronological order, so I’m less likely to confuse the baby pictures of each of my three children!

Every Picture Tells a Story
With my digital camera, I’m able to document and digitize some great moments in life. I make sure I always have my camera ready - which means it has to be charged and with plenty of memory. Once those images are captured, I put photos onto a CD all the time and send them to relatives in other parts of the country. For local friends and family, I often bring a disk over so we can view photos together on a TV or computer.

By far, my favorite way to share photos is by posting photos on the Internet by uploading them to an online photo site, such as Snapfish, Shutterfly, and Kodakgallery,. These services make it so easy to share digital photo albums with family and friends. After viewing, they can order prints, post comments about the photos, and even create customized t-shirts, gifts, and calendars. If you're still shooting pictures with traditional film, there are also dozens of services that will save your photos to CD, making it easy to store and share your valuable photos.

The best of these sites keep security in mind, and you should too. When you use these services, be sure to opt for making your photos private, not public. To share with loved ones, use a service that lets you send a unique web link or password for access to your photos.

The Negatives
With great technical power comes great responsibility, and digital photography is no exception. Many kids have cell phones that include a camera and many also have their own digital cameras. Be sure to talk to your children about the need to protect photographs from strangers online or even from peers who might use them inappropriately. You can track the sending of digital photos from the phone (just check your online or paper invoice) and make sure your child shows you the photos on their phone so you can advise them about anything you deem risqué or inappropriate for sharing.

The other big issue to be aware of is making sure you have copies of your valuable photos in more than one place. Like any other file or document, digital photo files can be lost, damaged, destroyed, or stolen. Computer crashes, power failures, building fires, or natural disasters can wipe out your computer files in an instant, which is why it's essential to back up your photos. Security programs, like Norton 360, provide automatic online backup that provides a seamless and secured method to backup your files via the Internet to an offsite server.

A good friend of mine recently learned the hard way about backing up photos. She and her family returned from a fabulous vacation in Italy with over 700 photos documenting every stop from Naples to Venice. She decided to take her camera, still loaded up with all the pictures, to a kiosk to start the long process of sifting, scanning, storing, printing, and sharing her favorite vacation shots. The photo kiosk, unfortunately, had a mal-function just as she inserted her camera’s memory card, causing an error that accidentally wiped out every single picture. There was no recovery option – and certainly no negatives to fall back on either! Needless to say, if she had thought of copying the files to a disk or CD beforehand, she wouldn’t have lost the only copy she had of her photos!

For many families, a single computer stores everything from photos and music to school assignments and tax documents. Losing your files can mean losing items your family uses in everyday life, not to mention years of memories and vital records. Remember, even a fire, flood, or electrical surge can wipe out more than one of your copies if they’re kept too close together. Whether it’s a hard drive, disk, or online storage, it’s so important to maintain redundant copies, kept in different places.

A Photo Finish
I recently found some old family pictures in a drawer – many requiring repair and restoration. I soon learned that with digital photography I was able to scan and store images to my computer’s hard drive, putting new life into nearly-gone and faded black & white pictures that belonged to my great grandmother! I even found software that helped me touch-up and resize photos that were water-damaged, faded, and scratched.

Recently, I surprised my father with a scrapbook that I created using an online service called Snapfish. I combined scanned family photos and historical information about his family tree into a hard-bound book. He was so thrilled to have it, he ordered copies for all my siblings and cousins!

Technology has opened up so many doors to us in the way of photography. Digital cameras allow many features and effects which would be impossible with film. Between your camera and your computer, you have the ability to capture and store hundreds of photographs, which is in sharp contrast to a non-digital camera, which requires regular changing of film. Digital photography enables you to experiment with camera settings, styles of images, and shooting techniques – all without the expense and inconvenience of film processing.

As long as you make sure your kids know what is appropriate for public (or even private) postings, and you do your best to keep redundant copies of your photos as backups, you’ll find the joys of digital photography extremely rewarding for you and your family.

Do you have a favorite digital photo story you want to share? Please write to me at Ask-Caroline@norton.com . You know I love to hear from you.

Thank you!