I have made tens of thousands of images over my lifetime. Prior to 2004 I shot primarily on film. I have these images, in shoe boxes, binders full of negatives and even a couple of personal photo books. My wife has amazing scrapbooks that she creates, saving the memories of our life together as well as her past. We can enjoy these physical representations of our memories. I also have many hard drives that contain my work from 2004 on. The majority of these images are only available on these drives. I would have to search through them to find images that have meaning for me. I have created a method of catologuing but it would still take some effort to find something specific. Today I was looking at an old drive from 2014 and came across these images of the Sonoma Balloon Classic. My point being, where are your images? What are you doing with them? What will happen to them over the years?

The digital age has allowed us to collect so much information. The number of images you capture is only regulated by the size of the storage device you are using. When I photograph an event I can come away with 100’s of images. How many of us go through those images? How many of us edit them and then present them in some form, either printed or online? Chances are you use one or two images, post them to your social media and move on with your life. For many os us social media has become the catalog of images from our life. The other day I was looking for an image to share and the only place I could find it was on the timeline of one of my accounts.

The above images were taken in 2014. I was looking through some old hard drives and saw the folder labeled “Sonoma Balloon Classic”. I had actually forgotten about these images. I woke up crazy early to capture what they called dawn patrol. Balloons were launching, prior to sunrise, for obvious reasons. If it weren’t for this blog I don’t think I would have ever looked at these images. They would have been left for my kids to find, after I am gone. I know this because after my Mom passed we ended up with thousands of images, in drawers, at her home. I still want to go through them to relive her memories and have them for my kids so that they can learn more about her life and my youth.

So the question you have to ask yourself, is it worth the time and effort to do something with your images/memories? Are you going to print them? Are you going to create an online archive? Do you want to create scrapbooks or photo books? Or do you want to create a blog and share them daily with anyone that wants to see them?

Until Tomorrow,

John

Wineberg Images

Where Are Your Memories? /November 16, 2023 by John Wineberg