Denver photographer routinely prints her personal photos to frame or put in albums, but she noticed that her clients aren’t as quick to move their images from the virtual world to the real one.
“Last year, I saw a client whose wedding I’d shot three years prior, and I’d never seen any of her wedding photos,” Murray said.
“And she’s a designer. I thought she’d know how to make an album. So I asked to see what she’d done. She pulled out her laptop, and I said, ‘It’s been three years! And you haven’t had them printed?’ “
Maybe that makes Murray sound like the mother of the bride, but she’s only 31. That’s roughly the age of most of her millennial clients, who are only starting to realize that maybe the cloud isn’t the best place for their memories to reside.
“What happens if you only put pictures on the Internet, and in 25 years, your child or grandchild wants the photos but can’t get them?” Murray asked.
“Hard drives fail all the time, but prints stand the test of time.”
Pick up your jaws, you readers old enough to remember when cellphones were big enough to use as a weapon. The Instagram generation is realizing that going all digital may be fine for work, but not at home, unless you live in a monastery.
“I work in an industry where I rely on my computer and rely on my iPhone, but having a printed photograph in hand is much more special,” says Danielle Gunter of , a Boulder advertising and merchandising company whose clients include the Bolder Boulder. “And that’s what I’m going to want to show my kids someday. I don’t want to curl up and show them my phone.”
So Gunter prints her favorite photographs, envisioning a gallery wall (not a Facebook wall) of images that can be updated by swapping one print for another, like the annual holiday photograph of herself and her husband.
While it’s possible to , using apps or the photo kiosks at drug stores and other outlets, both Gunter and Murray use the Denver-based , a self-described ” -friendly” design company that photos, books of photos and other objects on recycled paper and beetle-kill pine.
“In the past, the prints we’d get from drugstores and photo shops kind of lacked creativity,” Murray said.
“The people who ran those companies were executives of corporations, and the people actually printing the photos made minimum wage. Artifact Uprising uses educated people who know when the color looks off, and catch mistakes. I love their signature prints with the white mat. It looks well-designed, simple and elegant.”
Gunter makes photo books from her Instagram account. Her favorite project is the annual anniversary photo book she makes for her husband.
“Every year, I do a photo book with snapshots of the year,” she said. “Pictures tell a story, and we all want to tell a story. We’re back to the place where storytelling has been lost, and we want stories again.”
Sometimes, the photos that inspire stories are small, like the thumbnails that invite browsers to click on those Instagram and Tumblr images.
Sometimes, the photos are . Sunset Magazine’s November issue featured . The effect, in that case, brings the outside in so dramatically that the room’s windows look almost out of place.
Then there’s the happy medium, as defined by John Foster, whose Fort Collins home was featured recently on the Poudre Landmarks Foundation’s historic homes tour. His living room is dominated by an enormous photo of a 1978 BMW R100S motorcycle, souvenir of a four-day ride through the Rocky Mountains.
“I couldn’t pass up this amazing panorama view,” Foster said.
And, now, with a print that measures 3 by 12 feet, he never has to worry about losing that photograph.
Claire Martin: 303-954-1477, cmartin@denverpost.com or twitter.com/byclairemartin
