Today’s prompt for Blogtober (yep, almost halfway through the month and I’m still going!) was old photos. And I thought about digging through my box of photos from my university and working in France days, or even going to my mum and dad’s house and having a look through the old albums. But then I’ve already shared a few of the old beauties on this blog before – like this classic from my 11th birthday in 1989…

Or this one of when I cut my own fringe when I was two.

I suppose I could have just posted these pictures of Benedict Cumberbatch in my living room in 1998…

Or I could have gone with something a bit more recent like this one of Tim Minchin in tight shiny trousers at the Hammersmith Apollo in 2009…

But it got me thinking, how much the way we take photographs and record our memories has changed in my lifetime, and how different it will be for our children.

My parents have hardly any photographs from their childhoods, a handful at most. My entire childhood is preserved in about 10 photo albums that live at my parents house. And the four years that Toby has been alive, and the two years of Gabe’s life so far, have been captured in literally tens of thousands of photographs that mostly exist nowhere but on my external hard drive.

There are of course, lots of pictures of the boys, and our family memories here on this blog. And I hope perhaps that they will be able to look back at it when they are older in the same way I look at old photo albums. I know that quite a lot of my childhood memories are not real memories at all, but just memories of the stories told when I look at old photographs. I wonder what it will be like for Toby and Gabe, when so much of their lives have already been recorded.

Perhaps if I didn’t have this blog I wouldn’t take so many photographs. I know we probably wouldn’t have all the family pictures that I take for Me & Mine every month. I have been taking weekly pictures for Living Arrows for four years now, and I’m sure without it weeks would go by without me taking the boys’ picture.

It’s so easy now though isn’t it, when almost everyone has a camera in their pocket? I’m sure our children will find it hard to believe we actually had to remember to take a camera with us if we wanted to take pictures. And even stranger couldn’t see the picture until weeks or months later when you finished the film and took it to be developed, never quite sure what you would see.

I really should get more of our photographs printed though, or made into a photo book. I can’t imagine sitting at a computer to look through old pictures with my children, especially when I’ve taken so many of them. And although my pictures are backed up in a few different places there’s always that fear that you’ll lose them somehow.

What do you with your old photos? Do you print them or do they all live on your computer or in your phone?

 

This is the fifteenth post in my #Blogtober series – you can read the rest of the posts here.