As he smiles for a photograph little Ranjit takes, he fondly recalls his earlier memories of flipping through family albums during holidays.[break]
“It’ll be on his Facebook account in a few moments,” he sighs, continuing his game. His grandson retorts almost immediately, “Where can I save it then?”
“It was a culture back then to show photo albums to guests. The albums were placed in a cabinet in the drawing room,” shares Bista, adding “now I don’t remember the last time we printed a picture.”
Meet Sukriti Bhatta, 19. She has hundreds of photos on her Facebook account and is far from getting tired of uploading more. Her albums have photos of everything from her pretty painted nails to the latest pair of shoes she got herself.
Sukriti mostly uses her cell phone to take pictures for its convenience and compatibility. Her camera-enabled phone was a gift from her parents on joining high school.
Not a day has passed without her taking pictures since then. “From the college canteen to parties and hangouts, we always take pictures and post them online,” she shares.
Sukriti is definitely not alone. It’s almost a ritual among the youth of today to take hundreds of pictures of a single occasion and upload their favorites on social networking sites.
It’s ironic, however, that, although most of us take at least a picture almost everyday, printing them has become rare. Collecting pictures in traditional albums or using film rolls, Sukriti says, is “inconvenient and old school.”
Asked if she remembers the last time when she used the traditional films role to take pictures, she exclaims, “I have only faint memories. I used my digital camera before I got my first cell phone.” And if she ever feels the need to print any of the pictures, “I have a printer at home.”
With digital cameras and smart phones in such widespread usage, printing photos is dying off among the younger generation, the majority of whom does not want to be bothered with the time and expense of having actual hard copies of images.
Birendra Shah, Managing Director of Photo Hollywood, says, “The industry is dying.” He discloses that the ratio of printed films is decreasing by at least 35 percent.
Asked what he considers the root cause, he says, there is nobody to blame. With the intervention of the ever changing technology, everything around us seems compelled to adapt to its ways.
Even in a society like ours where culture is deeply rooted and encountered in everyday life, photo albums seem lost somewhere in between.
It was only two years ago that Photo Hollywood would receive around 4,000 film rolls to be printed in Dashain, this year the number paused at a mere 1,000 rolls.
The studio chain which had ten branches before has come down to maintaining seven. “We had no other option as it was getting difficult by the day to sustain. We get only one or two rolls to work on in an entire month.”
Carrying the negatives to the studio, waiting for them to be developed and printed and then pasting them up one by one in a plastic coated album, it seems, is too much trouble for the younger lot.
For printing pictures, Binamrata Kandel, 22, says, she has “no time for the hassle.” Her camera-equipped, Internet-enabled phone helps her get her photos published online in an instant.
Uploading pictures online not only enables her to share them with friends and relatives who are settled in various countries across the world but is also a safe place to preserve them.
And if she ever wants a hardcopy of the photograph, she “will always have available access to it and print as many copies as she wants in a few clicks.
Kodak was the first company to make films available to the masses. The company founded by George Eastman dates back to 1889. Later in 1976, it was declared the leader in the imaging industry with a total of 90 percent market share of photographic film sales in the United States. By the 1990s, not all was well for Kodak.
The trouble was the huge drop in sales of photographic films, largely because of the popularity of digital cameras. This 130-year-old film company, Kodak filed for bankruptcy earlier this month.
Related story
Eminem’s latest album secures No 1 spot on the Billboard 200 ch...
_20240730132124.png)
