PMA 2008 Las Vegas

PMA 2008 in Las Vegas, Nevada. I went with the expectation of learning more about what the photo industry was doing, and quite honestly I did. It has been 10 years since I attended the PMA convention and many things have changed. I saw an industry scrambling to reinvent itself in the wake of the digital age, some products and services looked interesting, many did not. One thing that seemed to me was striking was the fact that fewer and fewer people are making prints. This affects the print/processing industry the photographer, and sadly the one who didn't think it was important to make prints.
It seems seductive in this way when you can take a photo and park it on a hard drive free of any charge except for the cost of PC it lives on. Two problems exist...one, when the hard drive fails the photos disappear. Two, if you save your images on CD's or DVD's and put them in a trunk for your descendants to find in about 100 years, guess what? Technology will have moved on and there will probably not be anything to play those carefully saved and stored CD's and DVD's. Again the images are lost. A modern example would be Betamax tapes, 5" data disks, 8 track tapes...well the list could go on. What was "state of the art" of yesterday is unusable today. The ONLY way to preserve those memories is to make prints!
The visible image has been around for centuries! You can find them painted in the caves of Bordeaux France, the frescos of Rome, the oil paintings of the Renaissance, the photo of Matthew Brady. Never underestimate the power of the humble print.
The photographic industry is in the business of memories. Your local photographer and your local photofinisher are both committed to the same thing; providing the best quality images for you and your family to enjoy. Of all the personal items you can invest in, the only thing that will have any meaning to anybody will be the photos in the photo album.