To print or Not to print?

So, you got married on Aruba and had your wedding pictures taken by one of Aruba’s many wedding photographers, preferably one of Aruba’s premier wedding photographers, Aruba Wedding (us! ^_^ ). You love your wedding pictures. As a matter of fact, they are spot-on…they take you right back to that memorable wedding day on Aruba. Now what?! This article is not just about printing your wedding pictures or not. It is applicable to basically any picture. But, we will focus on your wedding pictures for this article. In today’s world, with a camera in every man/woman’s hand, pocket, etc., there are more than 208,300 pictures uploaded to Facebook a minute. Let’s do the math—24 hours times 60 minutes times 208,300…wow, that’s a whopping 300,000,000 images uploaded daily to Facebook alone. And that is not even taking into account all the other social media, duplicate pictures, and the pictures that are not uploaded and shared. Mind-blowing! So how does this affect you and your wedding pictures? Well, one of our preferred ways of delivering the images is digitally. Couples from the U.S., Latin America, and Europe generally don’t stay much longer than a week after their wedding day on Aruba, so although we try to deliver the wedding pictures of a couple’s Aruba destination/beach wedding within a week, more often than not, the couple has returned home before we have been able to deliver a printed image. So, they are left with digital copies to do whatever they want with (within obvious reason). Now, let me paint two scenarios that don’t have to do with wedding photography per se, but for most of you, they will be familiar.

SCENARIO ONE – MY IPHONE

I am a father of two little boys—my pride and joy, and that of my family. So we have a lot of pictures of them taken by my wife, mother, father-in-law, sister-in-law, and whatnot. They are mostly shared via WhatsApp, as is every picture of every tiny little detail of our lives—the car that was parked like crazy, the cup of coffee my wife had waiting for me, etc., etc. To cope with all those pictures flooding my iPhone, I extended my iCloud storage. And yet, within 3 months, I ran out of storage. So now I have a system—some pictures on Dropbox, some in iCloud, and some I just have to delete. But finding that one special picture isn’t that easy. I have to scroll through 1,146 pictures on my iPhone and 3,490 on Dropbox to find it, and by the time I find it, I will have probably reached my mobile data limit.

SCENARIO TWO – MY BABY PICTURES

I was born in the time of good ol’-fashioned photography. My father had an old SLR camera and took pictures of me when I was born and growing up. Bless my mother, she took the time to select the cutest ones and put them in an old-fashioned photo album. A couple of months ago, my second son was born, and about one month ago, we started noticing that I might have won the battle of the genes with this one. In other words, this little boy already started to look like me, and we wanted to verify that by comparing him to me as a baby. So, we went to grab the good ol’-fashioned photo album, and within a minute, we found a couple of pictures of me at about the same age as my son was then. Guess what? You wouldn’t know the difference. Do these scenarios seem somewhat familiar? I’ve noticed that a lot of pictures end up not getting printed and lost in the cloud, together with all the pictures of my kids. So, in conclusion, I’d just like to point out that there is no way of preserving pictures like printing and putting them in an album. It takes up a lot of time and space, but it’s time and space well used. Besides, there are so many creative ways of printing your pictures. These days you can even print on foam board, wood board, aluminum, and pallet wood, so you are not stuck with only canvas and paper. So go out there, get creative, and print your wedding pictures. You won’t regret it!!