The digital age shouldn’t be a reason to stop displaying physical photographs. Apart from paintings and art prints, your walls and desks would also look good with a family portrait or two. After all, every home needs a personal touch.
Preserving old family photos can be a great way to be reminded of how your family has grown over the decades. Old, worn-out photographs from long ago can now be retouched, thanks to photo retouching experts. An old photo’s quality can now be improved digitally, so you can display it like a recently taken picture, with subjects from an era that has long passed.
Displaying family photos can be done creatively so that they add more aesthetic appeal to your home. If you have children living with you, seeing family photos can boost their self-esteem.
Discover some creative ways to display family photos and learn how they affect your kids.
Wall Gallery
You can hang the photos on any blank and spacious wall in your home, such as your kitchen, dining area, and other hallways. A collage of photos on a wide wall is a good focal point for that area. Having both black-and-white and colored photographs on the wall gives it more elegance.
For kitchens, dining area, and family rooms, having old family photos displayed all-around can feel like a trip down the memory lane all the time. A collection of black-and-white, sepia, and colored photos is a good integration to a home’s decor, too.
If there’s an empty wall by your staircase, you can decorate it with an over-the-top photo display. Displaying the photos in a brightly-colored frame can add more balance and life to the blank wall. The bright colors also complement the duller photographs, like the black-and-white and sepia-toned pictures.
A Few Rules Before Displaying Photographs
Before having the photos displayed, you must have kept them stored somewhere, and depending on where and how you’ve stored them, the photos’ quality could be affected. Although photo retouching technology is now made available, it will never hurt to preserve photos as organically and possible.
Be sure not to store the photos in a place where temperatures can get too high because the warmth can turn the photos brittle. It is recommended to store photos in areas where the temperature stays below 75 degrees Fahrenheit.
It is also recommended to store photographs in areas with humidity levels higher than 15%, but not exceeding 65%. To preserve the color vibrancy, do not expose the photos to UV and fluorescent lights. The colors may fade in brightly lit places, so keep them somewhere dark.
How Family Photos Affect Children’s Self-Esteem
David Krauss, a psychologist from Ohio, says that it’s important to show the family as a unit, and children who see themselves as a valued part of that unit could be happier. Taking photographs with them and displaying them afterwards is a way to make them feel involved.
Family photos can also help children see who they are and where they fit. She added that children learn about genealogy and the uniqueness of their family’s lineage by seeing photographs. When they see themselves in the photos, they’d understand where they’d come from and why they belong there.
Displaying family photographs at home signifies that we value the memories we have with our family and we honor the ones that came before us. It is something that cannot be paralleled by digital and mobile technology. Printing photographs is one of the simplest things we can do to divert our attention from our gadgets while reminiscing in amazing memories.
