Photo Album

Snapshots

Today with digital cameras including our cellphones part of everyone's arsenal, we are taking more pictures than ever.
Problem is that for the most part no one is taking the time to print the photographs that their taking with their digital cameras.

When film was the only game in town, every roll of film exposed came back from the photo-finisher with negatives and prints.
As a rule the better photos were placed in albums, the rest dicarded or delegated to a box or drawer somewhere for further examination later.
Of course there were those of us who also shot with slide film, the slides when received were placed in storage binders made for this purpose. Some of the transparencies were then printed with the photos also placed in Albums, although some of us owned slide-projectors for viewing the transparencies on the big screen entertaining visitors.

Over the years I have managed to assemble a large collection of photographs going back to when I was given my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic that I shot mostly black and white photos with.
Later on as I climbed up the food chain acquiring better cameras, and I adjusted accordingly, shooting with both B&W and color film, then on to Kodachrome slide film, although still shooting with film.
Where I'm going with this is the fact that I have never stopped printing and placing my favorite photographs that I shot in albums.
Today I have a very large collection of photo albums, including the albums I inherited from my mother who spent hours placing her photographs in albums.

In the beginning, I purchased ordinary run of the mill photo albums to store my photographs in, but there came a day when I realized that my albums were kind of boring and a bit tacky with their transparent plastic sleeves to place the photograph's in, and I went looking for a better idea.
It didn't take me long to find a source for albums that were built like the albums of old, with plain mat black fine art pages that allowed you to place the photos how you wished through the use of the glue on black corners just like the ones used in some of the old albums I'd inherited from my mother.

One of my first albums of this sort that I found at Reid's stationary in Calgary years ago, is of a quality that not only has heavy quality fine art black pages, but it also has protective transparent pages in between the individual black pages, allowing you to see the photos before you get to the actual photos. This album also has a cloth bag to store the album in.
What photos reside within it you may ask....they would be some of my better transparencies shot on Kodachrome, and printed on quality photo paper with a process developed by Ilford called Cibachrome printing.

Whoops, getting away from where I'm going here in reference to a few of my old school albums shown in the above photograph. There came a day that I happened to be in a secondhand shop, and spotted some old school photo albums in a box. I realized there and then I needed to find more of these albums for displaying my photos in.
Over the years I've accumulated more of these very cool old original albums, several that were given to me by a friend who found them in a secondhand shop in Phoenix Az.

Maybe the one that had the biggest impact on me is one that came filled with all the original black & white photographs of a family that you can tell the photos were shot over a range of many years some in the 1940's. I've always wondered how someone discards a family album full of photographs, with it ending up in a second hand shop. I knew I couldn't remove the photographs and replace them with my own, as I felt like I wasn't showing proper respect to this family displayed in the pages of this album. Instead it has a place on a shelf with my many other albums, and from time to time I look through it wondering about the people that appear in these photographs.

So long story short, I still enjoy printing and displaying photos in my albums, photographs that I may have shot with one of my DSLR cameras or one of my obsolete film cameras like the Holga seen in the photo that uses 120 roll film still available.

Expand the photo for a closer look.....

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