Don't Just Take Photos, Do Something With Them

Saturday 5 September 2020, 15:30 by Nando Harmsen | 7,381 views | 14 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Photography used to be very different from how it is today. You bought a roll of film with 12, 24 or 36 photos. It took a week, a month or perhaps even months to fill it.

Then came developing, printing and sticking the photos into a nice album. If you photographed slides, you had to mount them one by one, which could take an entire evening.

An evening looking at slides. Who remembers it? It was quite an event.
Then came the most enjoyable part. You organised a slide evening for friends or family. Proudly, you showed the slides on a large screen.

Or you took your photo album with you when you went visiting, as it was called back then, and showed your photos to everyone. Perhaps you had the best photo printed at 20x30 centimetres, or even 30x45 centimetres.

The frameless interchangeable frames made it very easy to replace a photo with a new one.

Sometimes you didn't feel like it, or didn't have the time, and the photos ended up in a shoebox. Stacks of photos, stored in the analogue equivalent of a hard drive. That box full of memories sat in the attic. Or it was forgotten on a shelf in the wardrobe, behind the bed linen.

Everyone has a shoebox full of photos. Looking through them can be great fun.
Times have changed. We take photos as if our lives depended on it. A day spent taking photos no longer produces the 36 photos of a roll of film, but 360 photos on a memory card.

Or even more. This isn't a problem at all, because you can simply delete anything that isn't good, or good enough.

The number of photos is so large that our hard drives are almost full. We put them on social media, or on a photo-sharing site, where they are soon forgotten because of the constant stream of new photos. There are always new photos, which are secretly more interesting than the older ones.

When you look at it this way, it isn't that different from the past. The hard drive becomes the shoebox full of almost forgotten photos. And that's a shame. Especially because it has become so easy to do something with your photos. That is, of course, what you take photos for: to be seen.

Exhibiting photos is a wonderful thing to do. But it does require an investment. This is the official opening of my exhibition of photos from the Groote Peel in Wolstzyn, Poland, a few years ago.
The best thing is to exhibit your photos. An exhibition in a public space is fantastic to do. It often requires a considerable investment, though, and you need to have a series of photos that, as strange as it may sound, are worth exhibiting. An exhibition is also temporary, it comes to an end.

Another solution is to print your best photos. Turn them into posters. You can print them yourself, or have them printed. This way, you can cover your home with the best work you create.

Replace those photos from time to time. All the friends and family who come to visit, as it is called these days, can then enjoy the posters.

You usually don't have that much space at home to hang lots of photos, something you can do at an exhibition, such as this one of my photos of steam trains in Poland. If you hang your photos at home, make sure they are easy to replace.
Unfortunately, space is often limited. And you can't print everything. But you can create a beautiful photo album. This is often overlooked, but it is a perfect way to give your photos more life.

You look through an album more often and more easily than through a folder full of photos on your hard drive, or via a memory card on your TV. You can take an album out of the cupboard, put it on the table or take it with you when you go somewhere.

A separate album for every trip and every holiday. It becomes a beautiful selection and it is so easy to take it out of the cupboard and look through it.

Create an album of every trip, every holiday. Make an album of the best photos you took in a year. Do this every year. Make an album of your best bird photos, your finest landscapes or the best results of your street photography.

This way, your photos get a second life.

The album I made of my trips to Lofoten. I look through this album more easily than I look at the photos on the computer. It is also easy to take with me.

Don't turn your hard drive into a shoebox full of forgotten photos. Do something with them, make them accessible. Nothing is more beautiful than having a growing series of albums in your cupboard, next to the fantastic books by other well-known photographers you may have. Your photos are worth it.

Finally, I want to give you a tip. Most album providers have nice software that lets you create all kinds of standard albums. You can do it differently, too.

Create a template in Photoshop in the correct album dimensions. Most providers can tell you the correct dimensions, or list them on their website. You can then create the layout you want in Photoshop, with text, images, compilations or even blended photos.

Create a beautiful spread in Photoshop. This means you aren't dependent on the options offered by an album provider. This is a spread from my album about the trip to the Faroe Islands)
If you then export each spread as a JPEG image, you can place these JPEG images in the album provider's software as a single photo across the entire width. This is how you turn a standard album into the most unique album, one that nobody else has.

What do you do with your photos?

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About the author

Nando Harmsen has been photographing for more than 40 years. He specialises in wedding photography and landscape photography. Nando also gives talks, workshops, masterclasses and photo trips, and regularly reviews new and interesting equipment.

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14 comments

Piet van Kroonenburg wrote on Saturday 5 September 2020 at 19:31 | reply
Very recognizable story. Especially the tip at the end really resonates with me. I always got extremely annoyed by the downright lousy software you have to use to put together a photo book. That's why several years ago I also chose to create the page (30x30cm) completely ready-made in, in my case, Affinity Photo and save it as a TIFF or JPEG. Creating the layout in photo editing software generally works much better and is more controllable than in the book software. Once my book project is complete, it is 'just' a matter of importing all the photos as prefab pages into the book software once. The book software then recognizes a 30x30 photo and positions it neatly in the layout. I know in advance what my page will look like and therefore have more control over the end result. This way I can also bypass the templates for page layouts and determine my own layout.
Translated from Dutch.

Nando wrote on Tuesday 8 September 2020 at 10:20 | reply
@Piet;
That indeed works perfectly. Nice to read that you do it that way too.
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Wim wrote on Tuesday 8 September 2020 at 12:09 | reply
@wim
Put some beautiful (nature) photo,s on a stick.And let someone who never gets outside ,a sick person an elderly person enjoy all the beauty.
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Nando wrote on Tuesday 8 September 2020 at 13:10 | reply
@Wim:
why on a stick? That is precisely what it's about. How often do you make the effort to plug such a stick into your PC, or your TV, and actually look at those photos.
Make a photo book out of it instead. You can put that on the table and leaf through it from the comfort of your armchair, or in the case of someone who is ill and confined to bed, simply in bed.
Translated from Dutch.

mousquito wrote on Tuesday 8 September 2020 at 14:11 | reply
I have a digital frame here, where I "publish" my photos via a stick and when someone comes by they see a different photo appear each time, fun topics to talk about like "oooh remember that day" or "wow that was a long time ago" and sometimes I change the photos on the stick, especially when an old mate is finally in the country again, then I adjust the photos to his visit. This is the grandma variant who switched the little frames of the grandchildren on TV depending on who came by Only I am honest enough to admit it.
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Nando wrote on Tuesday 8 September 2020 at 15:37 | reply
@Mousquito:
I also have one of those frames, but I don't like looking at it. So the thing has also been gathering dust in the cupboard for years.
You pick an album up from the table, flip through it, and you can easily go back or forward for a moment. An album measuring 20x20 centimetres does produce photos that are up to 20 x 40 cm in size. You can't do that with your digital frame.
Of course it's personal. If it works well for you, then that's good, right?
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Eric Dankbaar wrote on Tuesday 8 September 2020 at 16:55 | reply
My hard drives were filling up too, and since 2015 I have been making photo presentations of the many hikes I take, including music and titles/maps relating to the route walked. I upload these to YouTube and share them with the world this way: Http://www.ericdankbaar.nl/Youtube
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Henk Hoogink wrote on Tuesday 8 September 2020 at 22:23 | reply
Especially if you also like writing besides photography, My Album is a nice medium to do something creative with all those many photos you have taken.There you make "Photo stories" that you can publish/share via FB, WhatsApp or email.
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paul wrote on Wednesday 9 September 2020 at 08:11 | reply
For nature enthusiasts, they can post their photos of wild plants, birds, animals, insects, etc. on waarneming.nl or waarnemingen.be. That way, your photos still have scientific value and you enjoy nature and taking beautiful nature photos more intensely. Moreover, you learn the species name, the site even helps with identifying the species.
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Elja Trum wrote on Wednesday 9 September 2020 at 08:17 | reply
@Henk; if you like writing and photography, you can of course always become a blogger on Photofacts.
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Nando wrote on Wednesday 9 September 2020 at 10:05 | reply
@Eric;
Uploading a presentation to YouTube. That is indeed a nice way to share your photos.
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Erika Blok wrote on Wednesday 9 September 2020 at 10:59 | reply
Creating a photo album is of course an option.

We have chosen to create AV shows. A modern form of crossfading slides. Framing them is now replaced by placing the photos in a special program (we use Wings Platinum) on one or more timelines, causing the photos to crossfade beautifully. Music is then placed underneath, and sometimes sounds (ambient sound) and spoken words as well, so that you get a wonderful whole. This is all done in the same program.

We can play these shows via the television or a projector, which gives us the opportunity to share our images with others. In addition, we are members of a club where we regularly watch one or two shows with others and provide constructive criticism so that the shows keep getting better and the viewing enjoyment keeps increasing as well.
Would you like to know more about AV shows and whether there might be a club near you? Then take a look at this site https://nvbg.nl/
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guest wrote on Wednesday 9 September 2020 at 15:06 | reply
It was interesting again,I look at more photos on a stick or in an album.
Regards,G.Osten
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Demeyere Philippe wrote on Wednesday 9 September 2020 at 17:17 | reply
A photo book is the most interesting medium for me.
I have been doing slide shows for the family for years, but nothing appeals to me more than a beautiful photo book.
In addition, I can have them printed in multiple copies if necessary to offer to others.
I have a collector friend who regularly asks me to make a photo book of his collections.
A beautiful presentation naturally retains its charm.
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