Taking a photograph is one thing. I feel that the art of photography is a bit lost when you start off digitally because people become used to shooting the photo and then relying on photoshop (or VSCO which is the hot new shit these days) in post editing to tweak their photos. There's nothing entirely wrong about that but having started off in the film medium allowed me to recognize how light acts and falls upon your subject and in getting the shot right the first time (however there are darkroom practices used to tweak film photographs as well, assuming you have a darkroom to work in). With that being said, another part of photography, I feel, is losing some steam and that's printing out your photographs, whether they are analog or digital.
I used to be very good at printing all the photos I took. It isn't until you print out your photos that they become photographs because then they become tangible. Something you can hold and feel. Often I see photographers take digital photos and then not printing them afterwards unless they really have to. Prints are really inexpensive these days. If you're not working with a professional lab, anyone can go into Costco, Walgreens, CVS or Riteaid and have your photos printed out at a couple of cents per image. People should start getting into the habit of printing out their photos and putting them into their personal curated albums. It's one thing to click your mouse on a webpage to scroll through your photos in a virtual domain but it's an entirely different experience to turn pages to sift through your photographs in the physical domain.
During a birthday party for a friend, we were talking about the subject of old photographs of friends and I had mentioned that I had tons of "so and so" in their younger years so when someone asked if they can see it, I happily obliged and brought my albums. The park was not that far from my place (it was a couple of blocks down the street actually), so I borrowed my friend's car, went home and picked up as many albums as I could carry to bring back to the park.
I documented my friends gathered around and going through pages and pages of photographs that I took of friends through the years. I hope they enjoyed the experience as much as I did taking the photos.
"Sifting through the years" / 6x6 medium format Rollei Retro 80s / July 2012