Page 17 - MidWeek - April 19, 2023

Memories Paulette Ito
Photography is a great way to capture moments and remember events. Beginning at a young age, I started taking photos and carrying around a camera with extra rolls of film. On family vacations, I would regularly bring 20-30 rolls of 36 exposures to ensure I always had enough to click away as much as I wanted.
My desire to capture every moment through photos increased after attending a seminar by Dewitt Jones, a world- class photojournalist, motion picture director, inspirational speaker and National Geographic photographer. He said
when he takes a picture he feels is decent — “There’s always another right answer,” he says — he’ll take hundreds and sometimes thousands of photos to find the right one.
Many of the photos I had taken in the past had been blurry, and I often missed the “perfect” shots. But Dewitt’s lecture helped me realize that even professional photographers will increase their chances of getting a “perfect” photo through sheer numbers, so I started clicking away with absolute abandon.
The advent of digital cameras allowed me to shoot even more photos,
April 19, 2023 MIDWEEK 17
PAULETTE ITO
SVP Marketing
Hawaiian Financial Federal Credit Union
Picture-perfect
and as storage cards got larger, I was able to bump up the resolution as well as the number of photos. And, digital technology allowed me to instantly delete photos I didn’t want to keep. Of course, the ease of digital eliminated some of the fun and anticipation of waiting to pick pictures from the developers.
In the beginning of the digital era, I would print selected photos and sheets of thumbnails so I could easily choose the “right” ones. However, I was not nearly as quick and efficient as Longs or Costco in developing my pictures, so that process dwindled over time as my hard drive and SD cards continued to fill up.
Fast-forward to today and I’m still taking copious amounts of photos, but with my cell phone rather than a digital camera. Cell phone camera technology has advanced so rapidly that some have even been used to produce feature films. I enjoy my smartphone’s ability to take, store and share photos, and particularly appreciate
the automatically created slideshows around my milestone events that always take me down memory lane. And, technology makes it convenient to share with others.
But convenience can come at a price. While many photo storage apps initially allowed unlimited space for photos and videos, this is no longer the case. Now, people like me who have thousands of photos on their phones need to care for them like prized possessions by regularly sorting and organizing them to ensure they’re still relevant. I find takingphotoscreenshots of reservations, confirmation numbers and other important items more convenient than scrolling through emails or opening apps. In the “free storage” past, not deleting photos wasn’t a problem, but with paid storage becoming the norm, keeping photo storage tidy is important.
Of course, backing up a prized photo archive is also very important. The photos on my phone are only a fraction of what
I keep on my external hard drive and cloud storage. After every large event, I sync my phone with my cloud storage and then download my cloud storage to my hard drive. This process allows me to share my pictures with those who have access to my cloud storage account, as well as keep a backup for my backup.
The goal of the “Get Your House in Order” campaign is to help all Hawai‘i’s ‘ohana enjoy a higher quality of life. Having a robust, well- organized photo archive will allow you to share your most important life memories for generations to come.
If you don’t have a plan for creating your digital photo archive, make a plan and document it in your Ho‘okele guidebook, which is the perfect place to keep all the relevant information for your cloud storage provider and/or external hard drive. Make sure to share the location of your completed Ho‘okele guidebook with your closest family or friends to protect your future generations
from possible loss of important family memories.
Ho‘okele is only available from Hawaiian Financial Federal Credit Union’s website. This personal planning guide documents your most important information, helps keep your affairs well organized and serves as a roadmap on future life events you may need to prepare for.
There are four phases of the “Get Your House in Order” campaign, with a new section of the Ho‘okele booklet available from the HIFICU.com/gyho website during each quarter. Get your house in order and download your copy today! What important family memories will you preserve in your Ho‘okele guidebook?
For more information about the “Get Your House in Order” campaign, email GYHO@hificu.com. And tune in to KITV at 7 p.m. every Saturday to watch Yunji de Nies talk with local experts on how and why to get your house in order.