What are Digital Negatives?

WHAT ARE DIGITAL NEGATIVES ///

Let’s go back in time:
Photographs were captured on film. There was no looking at the back of your camera to see if you caught the moment or gauged the light right or to see if your subject’s eyes were open. You rarely took more than one photo of a particular item because, let’s face it, film was & is expensive & you only have 24, maybe 25, if you’re lucky 26 photographs you can capture on that roll of film.

Once you finished your roll of film [and sometimes you took a silly photo at the end just to “finish the roll”, am I right?] you had to get that roll developed. That meant taking it to a lab or if you were my Great-Grandfather – taking the film to his darkroom and exposing the negative to a whole process of chemicals, in order to get to your final destination: the print.

Those negatives were like gold. If you lost it, that was it – you could never get that image re-printed. Keep the negative safe & you had the power to re-print, get multiples made, or enlargements. All you needed was the negative.

Digital negatives are the same except instead of a strip of brown film you keep in an envelope, it’s a folder of .jpgs that’s stored on your computer. Keep them safe & you have the power to order unlimited prints in various sizes from your favorite lab. My favorite labs are mpix and York Photo, but there are literally hundreds of places you can get your images printed. Digital negatives allow you to give you photos as gifts [here’s a hint: when you get married – wedding photos make the best 1st Christmas gifts for family!], hang them on your walls, scrapbook them, make thank-you cards out of them, the sky is the limit!

The most important thing: don’t let your digital negatives just live on your hard drives. Print them! That’s what they were meant for! Hang them up! Display them! Someday, that’s what your children & your children’s children will have to remember you by, long after your computer and old hard drive fades away.

So, how do you receive digital negatives from me?
I’m so glad you asked! That’s the topic I’ll be talking about next! Stick around!