If you live in any area that's not remote or disconnected from the modern world, virtually everywhere you look there's a screen of some shape and size. And that screen will either bombard you with advertising, or it will be your iPhone screen, or the one on your laptop or TV. Everything about today's world is visual and that's a pretty good thing if you think about it.
We take and share our photos like never before and the fact that you can have a coffee in Thailand and share the photo with someone in Dallas is something cool that we take for granted.
Still, with all that, something seems to be missing. I remember being a kid and going on summer vacations. There was of course an old, trusty camcorder everywhere with us, but we also had an instant camera. I remember being fascinated with the blank pictures coming out of the camera and watching them come to life.
(Learn more about these prints here)
Then my generation grew up and we owned the first phones to have cameras on them. We gradually lost contact with printed photography and we went from looking at printed albums with our friends and family, to clicking for likes on Facebook.
While that might be convenient up to some point, it has made us lose contact with the physical side of photography. A picture will always feel better in your hand than on a screen. It will always look better framed than on a laptop.
A print doesn't have to be large to have an impact or be meaningful. Polaroid prints are the best proof. Throughout the history of cameras and photography, instant prints have made their way from family albums to art museum walls.
In recent news, one of the founding fathers of the Internet, Dr. Vinton Cerf, Vice President of Google, presented a theory that sounds pretty bad for all digital photography. The way we store data is changing with each generation. Remember floppy disks and 20 kb scans? How we shoot and preserve our photos today will become history in the same way and our children are probably going to have a good laugh at the technology we use today.
Even so, some things never change. Paper has been around as a storage method for thousands of years, and even though some tech gurus have predicted its death, things are starting to look the complete opposite.
Paper is coming back, and what's even cooler, Polaroid style prints are making a comeback as well.
A Belgian company called Polabora is on a mission to help store your photography and memories in an awesome, timeless style. For a little over $10, you can get 16 awesome looking polaroid-style prints of your favorite images. Printed photography isn't going away. It's just getting a little better.
Check out Polabora and their awesome offers on their website.