There are a lot of photographers out there who have loved photography since they were born…they were raised in dark rooms, and came of age winding film. Or so, it seems. I wasn’t one of those people. I had a plastic barbie camera when I was eight…and I broke it. I didn’t really pick up photography again until I was in my 20’s! I may not have been a photographer from the beginning, but I have ALWAYS loved pictures. Even as a little kid I remember really being excited to pull out our family photo albums and look through them every once in a while. I loved seeing what I looked like as a baby, seeing what our home at the time looked like in pictures, and just reliving things I either remembered or was too young to remember. For me, picture albums were important because as someone who was adopted they give me a history, which is something I don’t have before a certain point in my life because all of the people who were there don’t know me anymore, and obviously, I can’t remember it.

I still find picture albums really powerful! I have a small album of photos from my childhood, and a few of the years since I turned 20 and moved out on my own. It’s really interesting to look through the first few years of my 20’s now that I’m nearing the mid-late 20’s and reminisce on all of the fun times we had. I know that one day in the future, memories of THIS time in my life will be really special and important too, not just to me, but to any future little Nesbitts down the road who might want to see what we looked like when we were young. With that in mind, I’ve made it one of my personal goals to both take and print as many personal photos as I can remember to over the course of this year.

I started by ordering a book of my 2013 Instagrams and a book of iPhone pictures from Artifact Uprising using their app. I’ll definitely have to share those with you when they come! I also ordered about 200 prints of random iPhone pictures from the past couple of years via Kicksend, an iPhone app for printing photos. Unlike a few of the other apps I tried, including PostalPix, Kicksend is really cool because you can have your order sent to a local store (Walgreens, Target, etc) where you can pick them up and pay for them in an hour or so. I’m really impatient, so this was perfect for me!

Ease of use: Using the app was as easy as choosing the store I wanted to pick up from and picking the photos! Narrowing them down was the hard part!

Print quality: Normally, I would never print my photos at Target or Walgreens and I would always advise having any nice pictures printed somewhere legit. But for iPhone photos, let’s be real, they’re just fun snapshots, not really all that serious. The print quality was fine for what it was…economy printing of phone pictures. Some of the pictures we took in low light were grainy, but I was actually impressed by the clarity of the ones taken in good light! It just goes to show that no matter what type of camera you use, light is the number one key to great images!

Value: Can’t speak for this really, because cost depends on where you decide to have the photos printed. I paid about $67 bucks for $200 prints, so I’m sure I could have ordered them somewhere else for cheaper (probably could have ordered them from a legit print co for cheaper!) but I also have no problem paying more for speed and convenience.

I definitely recommend checking this app out if you’re like me, and want to start taking the time to preserve your memories. It might sound silly to some people, but holding the prints of my phone pictures in my hand was ten times more powerful of an experience than just scrolling through them on my phone…and, who knows when they might lose their iPhone, or where the photos will go when we’re all using see through phones and taking holograms in the future??? Tech proof all those moments you’ve captured with your phone by printing them out!