One secret (unsummery) thing I do every summer | Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Happy Friday! Let’s do a fill-in-the-blank:
Summer is for________________.
What do you do in the summertime? It can be beach trips and road trips. Maybe it’s travel and time with family. Better yet, it’s a chance to read and play and swim and do all the things that we can’t do in the winter months. Summer gives us a kind of permission to have fun.
What summer means to me | Photo: Teach Hub
My three favorite things about summer include swimming outdoors more, hanging clothes out to dry on the clothesline, and wearing sundresses.
But there’s one other thing I do every summer in my business. I clean and archive. (Did the needle just come scratching off the record?)
Take the needle off the record | Photo: Electronics/HowStuffWorks
Yes, it’s true, I clean and archive even if it doesn’t sound as fun and carefree as the summer ideas listed above.
Spring is booked with graduation portraits, family portraits, and First Communion portraits so spring cleaning is a good idea in any business…it just doesn’t happen in the spring for me anymore.
No idea what the origin of this photo is, but I love it!
Who else looks like this while cleaning?
Why am I mentioning this? While life always looks more exciting on social media, and travel is my favorite thing to do, this blog is where we chat about the real side of life. Cleaning and archiving are the real side of my business photography life.
My secret summer activity - cleaning and archiving
I’ve been professionally photographing for almost 14 years now, and that means I started my business shooting film, amassing quite a collection of negatives (personal and professional).
I often get calls from clients asking if they can still get their personal film developed (yes, and you can e-mail me if you would like a list of labs) and what to do with their own negatives that they’ve been storing over the years. If you need to store them, art boxes and archival binders are great. (Want more help with this? The Library of Congress has a great help page on it!) If you want to digitize your negatives, a scanning service can help. In fact, Dave Johnson wrote a great article for PC World titled, “The best and worst services for digitizing your photos” sharing who they live for best overall service (ScanCafe), the easiest to use (GoPhoto), and the most versatile (ScanDigital).
Dave Johnson's article answers the question, "What do I do with all these negatives? How do I make them digital?"
In this digital world, it’s easy to amass a collection on our camera phones, our memory cards, and our hard drives without realizing how much space it is taking up. There really is an easier way! Cleaning, editing, and archiving my work is how I tame this beast. And then I can get back to the real fun of summer.
These pool floats look like fabulous fun!
I’d love to hear from you…What do you do to enjoy summer?
More importantly, what do you do to clean up the digital files on your computer? I’ve started to pull some ideas together on my Pinterest board. Go to check it out and share your own images!