Laser Disc, Minidisc, CD-ROMS, DVDs, Blu-Ray, USB drives and hard drives.  What do they all have in common?  Besides being storage media, they get corrupted, scratched or just stop working at the wrong times!

Remember the times when you had something important stored on a DVD backup, but when you tried to open it on the computer, the disc couldn’t be read?  What would you do if that drive contained your wedding photos or photos of your child’s milestones for the year?

Recordable discs come and go, computers will always be released for the newest storage methods.  Laptops are now being sold without an optical drive to read CDs or DVDs.  Most people are able to only use tablets, which have no USB ports or optical drives too.

Social media sites such as Facebook, Google Plus and Instagram may be an alternative, but being a technology platform, they’re also susceptible to failing.  Other websites have come and gone with data being lost.

One of the tried and true methods is to have photography prints.  Apart from having them framed and put up around your home as symbols of your life, the photograph prints may also be stored in albums.  Remember the times as a child when your family would pull out the albums to look back on over the years?  Would you prefer to be holding a photographic print and savouring that piece of photo that is as old as  the milestone, or hold whatever technological device will be at hand with the potential of not knowing how to use it?

Wayne  is a photographer with a distinct style – combining wedding photojournalism and contemporary portrait photography.