Have you ever produced an awesome piece of writing and then the technology changed and you couldn’t gain access to the information that you worked so hard to produce?  What about taking pictures with the infamous flip phone (made by one of the major carriers) and then they moved to smart phones and you couldn’t move the data from the flip  phone (old technology) to the smart phone (newer technology) and had to settle, in some instances, for losing that information?  How about this scenario — have you ever had music recorded on cassette tapes and (remember the Walkman cassette players) then CD players were introduced?  For some that are “e-ignorant,” remember trying to figure out how to get the music from the cassette players (old technology) converted to a CD player format (newer technology) so that you wouldn’t lose you recorded music they worked so hard to record and accumulate.

What’s my point in bringing this to your attention?  My point is this: the world has become increasingly device dependent and is relying on technology to guide us through this world of propaganda, misinformation, and data mines.  Even our most cherished pictures live on a smart devices.  

It is my belief that keepsakes such as personal and familial milestones are things that need to be printed and placed into an album so that the generations that come after we are long gone can see how we have lived and loved. This great planet that we live on and love for its aesthetic glory is forever changing.  Places that we once visited as a child have changed or no longer exists as we remembers it.  Our favorite childhood neighborhood has changed. Our family structures have changed: in some instances, parents and grandparents have passed on, but does that mean that those memories have too as well?  The answer is emphatically no! There was a time in history when printed our pictures and placed them into albums and until this day, we are enjoying those moments and get to share those moments with our children and they will get to share those same images with their children. It is also my belief that by not printing our images — whether we capture them with a point and shoot camera or had them created by a professional portrait photographer — we are contributing to an unintentional digital death. The only way to avoid this unintended digital death and elimination of our history is to get our images printed.  As professional photographers, it is our duty to educate our clients of the importance of printing albums or wall art.  The technology that currently has our attention will change: that is inevitable. But our life’s mission of preserving our family history should not change.

Let me drive this point home a little harder. How many of you depend on a smart phone to maintain and keep your mortgage information? Better yet, how many of you use your smartphone to keep one’s living will stored on it?  If you depended solely on your smart device to keep this information on it and you forget your password, what happened next?  If any of this information was to ever become lost, which I can bet has happened at least once too many of my readers, think of the stress that would probably come with it.  Remember the trauma and headaches you went through waiting in a phone queue waiting on someone to answer your call only to have that call dropped or transferred somewhere else to wait behind another 15 callers and then the call gets dropped. Ugh!

That being the case, why would you leave your photographic memories in the hands of technology?  If you should go to a professional photographer in Miami or any where else in the world, trust the only thing that works in preserving your cherished photographic memories or important documents - GET THEM PRINTED! 

Leonard Bethel Fine Art Photography is a portrait photography service located in Miami, Florida and we also serve the greater Broward and Palm Beach counties.  We specialize in individual, family, and high school senior portraits.  We are also available to travel to make sure that you leave a legacy for generations to come. We believe that each family should have a professional portrait captured, printed, and then placed on a wall or in an album.  Keep in mind that TIME WAITS FOR NO ONE.  Call today and schedule your free consultation.  Allow us at Leonard Bethel Fine Art Photography to capture that special moment in time that would allow you to preserve this information with your children and your children’s children. Remember, depending solely on digital devices to preserve your families most precious and important memories, is tantamount to destroying generations of information that could be and should be shared with generations to come.