My Year So Far as President of the NCPF

As I come to the halfway point of my first session as President of the NCPF I can look back and say it been a very enjoyable start to my term in office. I have been invited to a number of clubs and met many interesting club members, and have always received a warm welcome.

Now we are into the festive session, and the days are getting shorter and the weather is changing. It is not the time to put our camera into hibernation, though, but to go out and capture the winter wonderland in all its glory.

Back in the warm sunny days of the summer (remember them) I was asked to put pen to paper and write an article. So, this is it!

Password Not Needed

As I sit here on the veranda in the warm evening sun at our Swedish summer house, our Swedish friends are sharing with us some of their life travelling stories and showing us their photo album of the family and travels.

This got me thinking that in this age of digital photography about five billion photos are taken in the UK per day, so how do we save them? Well, at the start of digital photography we stored them on floppy discs. But what has happened to those photos now when floppy discs have gone and, if we still have them, can we access them? Next came CD and DVDs. Now that the latest computers no longer have a CD reader built into them, how do we view them? Are they lost because digital technology has moved on, causing photos never to be seen again?

Next we saved our photos on all different types of memory cards now lying at the back of a drawer, lost or forgotten about. Do we still have the card readers to read the cards?

This was followed by storing our photos on the computer’s hard drive and if the computer HD failed we lost the lot. So we put them on external hard drives. Hundreds, if not thousands, of photos are stored on them, some may never be seen again. Nowadays we have moved on and are starting to store our photos directly to the Cloud (using a password) from our phones, computer and some cameras and paying some company to look after them for us.

But how do we share our photos with our friends and family? We can do it by using social media, but we are viewing them on a small screen on a phone or a tablet, and we are not seeing them at their best or do we all have to sit around a computer to view them?

As I said, if we store our photos on the Cloud and we are paying an annual fee what happens when we pass on? Will our family keep paying the fee so they can view our images and remember all those great photographs we have taken? Will they remember the password, or will it all be lost?

There is a way to store our images for posterity and that is by making a book, so in times to come, people can look back and say what a great photographer they were. No Password Needed.

I would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

Gerald Chamberlin DPAGB, EFIAP
NCPF President & Awards Officer