Eudora Welty
I am not going to post the pictures here as they are full of other people's kids.
We have a wonderful shot of youngest's whole, 8th grade, graduating class after the luncheon last week.
And we have a fabulous shot of middle's, whole, high school class tossing their caps after high school graduation on Friday night.
Both pictures are very unique and not something most families would have.
I have always been good about having extra prints made when other people's kids are in our pictures and then giving the prints to the families. I have been doing this for 16 years. In the times when I was not having pictures developed on a timely basis and had things printed years later, I still passed on belated pictures to families.
We have over a dozen envelopes, with pictures and a note, going out in today's mail to youngest's closest 8th grade friends. A copy of the really great group shot, in addition to other candid shots including the kid, are stuffed in each envelope. Some envelopes only contain 2 pictures, other envelopes have half a dozen, but each friend is receiving something.
We have a stack of the high school cap toss pictures sitting by the back door. As middle attends graduation open houses, she is giving each friend a card and a copy of the picture. The picture, in my opinion, will be truly cherished. It is a great shot of the kids. (We sat on the end of a row on the far outside edge of the facility at graduation, when the kids were just about to dismiss, my husband went scooting up the aisle/unseen and was outside waiting for the kids to emerge. He was standing there camera ready and was able to get a series of 4 pics as they gathered and tossed. One of the toss pictures is priceless.)
I probably mentioned this in 2008: A mom was gathering pictures for 8th grade class video when middle graduated. The mom called me and said - I have photos here from over 80 families and there is NO comparison between the quality of your family pictures and everyone else's pictures. Your family shots are so much better, what are you doing differently?
I said (at that time) my husband was still taking pictures with an old fashioned 35mm camera. I said my husband took dance pictures for a photography studio as a part time job in college. He has that kind of eye and is most excellent. Middle also has that kind of eye and takes great shots. We only get good pictures developed. Now that we have good quality digital (not the digital that first came out), and can check on scene, the quality of our pictures has improved even more.
And we have always had our pictures developed by a photography place. So we go to a store whose only business is photography. They are most excellent. They have a small studio and will take family portraits and passport pictures also, but the vast majority of their business is developing pictures.
I started out taking in rolls of film. Now I download camera into our computer, a full copy is saved on hard drive and a second copy is saved on back up hard drive. And then I upload pictures into the website for the store and order my pictures on line. I use the slow download option so the quality is as high as possible. So, every one of our pictures are stored in three places. We get a discount on all pictures printed by buying a membership. The membership normally pays for itself with the first order.
All this month, with a million things going on, I walked in the door from each event and downloaded/uploaded pictures immediately. I also ordered the pictures immediately. This week I ordered pictures nearly every day. The pictures have all been picked up from the store and all of them/100% of them are either in a photo album, in an envelope ready to be mailed, or are the stack of cap pictures sitting by the backdoor.
If I had waited until the end of the week,
1. I would have had a lot of pictures to download/upload/order/sort. And
2. it is possible someone might have hit the wrong button on the camera and deleted pictures (middle who is very good with camera settings had this happen when she was in Poland and lost 2 days worth of really great pictures, pains her to this day, because the other kids' photos were not of the same quality).
3. it would have been hanging over my head and making me feel behind about things. I could do this photo work even with my broken foot!
Kids are able to post pictures on their Facebook pages on a very timely basis. The cap toss picture was up before middle went to bed graduation night.
I still give kids' friends hard copy prints even though things are posted on Facebook. There is nothing like having a picture, in your hand, in my opinion.
PS - there was a professional photography at oldest's and middle's graduations. I ordered a download of their pictures instead of ordering actual prints.This is the first time I knew to do this. It started because the photographer for the oldest only had wallets and then 5x7's as their smallest print size. Our photo albums all use 4x6. After emailing back and forth with a non-helpful customer service rep, a helpful customer service rep said - do you realize you can order a download and then have any size you like printed locally? No, I did not know that. I had clicked directly on the Order Prints option and had been solely focused on lack of size options. So, when the on-line order opened up for middle's graduation, as soon as I verified that only wallets and 5x7's were available (different photographer but same options), then I looked for download option. Yes, I paid between $35-40 for each download, but now I have them.
