Photo-related Activities

Photo-related activities at home are categorized into photo taking, managing, browsing, sharing, and display in this section. The findings about people’s photo-related activities including people’s habits and preferences, the annoyances, and the tools people use, are described as follows.

4.1.1 Photo Taking

People like to take photos of memorable moments in a natural way for future reminiscence.

The occasions for family photo taking include birthdays and weddings of each family member, parents' wedding anniversary, Father's Day and Mother’s Day, Chinese New Year, family travel, and some other family reunions. On these particular holidays or anniversaries,

members in the family get together to have meals, chat and take photos of all family members attending the party.

Most of the informants consider family photography should be artless and dislike posing their family members before taking photos for them. They prefer to capture more natural and vivid look of their family and record family life honestly for future reminiscence. This can be seen in the quote below from the father of Family 1 (F1).¹

1 In subsequent quotes, the following notation is used to identify speakers: I= Interviewer, M1= Mother of Family 1, F2= Father of Family 2, S3= Only son of Family 3, D4c= Third daughter of Family 4.

F1: The purpose of family photography is recording dribs and drabs of family life. I would like it to be natural. I am opposed to adding artificial after effects on photos. It is not necessary to take family photos in an artistic way. I think taking family photos isn’t that complicated. Interesting dribs and drabs in the family captured with photos will simply become lovely reminiscences after several years.

When the informants were requested to pick photos having specific meanings to them, many of them use terms such as "for the first time", "rarely", and "memorable" to describe their photos. Photos recorded of memorable experiences can be very special to people. When people look at these photos, they can still recall and describe the special scenes they saw.

Besides, most of them are satisfied with the functions of their cameras. One of the informants said, for a good photo, the moment to take the photo is more important than the camera and technical skills. He indicated that good photos could also be taken with Instamatic (point-and-shoot camera).

4.1.2 Photo Management

The most common way people store their photos is putting them into photo albums. Printed photos retrieved from the printing store are packed in light plastic bags (See Figure 3) or little photo albums that are easy to be flipped (See Figure 4). These bags or albums are usually placed in a public area at home such as the living room. Photos in this form are accessible and browsed most frequently. After being in the public area for a few days, part of these photos is rearranged in bigger albums in some families. This rearranging behavior is similar to putting fragmental files in a big file clip. Big photo albums are stored in the closet of the living room or bedroom. (See Figure 5) Since the photos are stored in the closet, people rarely flip them.

Likewise, after digital photos were burned into CDs, they were also scarcely browsed. (See Figure 6) In truth, people rarely browse old photos, especially when the photos are not easily accessible.

Figure 3 (on the left) Photos packed in light plastic bags; Figure 4 (on the right) Little photo albums

Figure 5 (on the left) Big photo albums stored in the closet Figure 6 (on the right) Digital photos burned into CDs

Most people don't take much effort on managing photos. They only organize and annotate their photos simply. Arranging photos in chronological order is the basic way people manage their photos. When conventional photos in the same film are retrieved from the printing store, the clerk in the store puts the photos in plastic bags or photo albums chronologically for their clients. Likewise, when digital photos are transmitted into computers, they are automatically arranged in chronological order. Besides arranging photos in chronological order, some families annotated their photos with dates, places, events and other information on the big photo albums to preserve details of the photos for future remembrance. Most big photo albums are preplanned with memo columns beside the photo columns for users to add annotations. Different from preplanned photo albums, photo scrapbooks allow users to stick

their photos in their own way. One of the informants in this research uses photo scrapbooks to collage his photos enthusiastically with bookmarkers, letters from friends, and other objects related to the photos as decorations. Another informant puts printed material of her tour into photo album of her travel:

D6a: I used to arrange photos of my first travel aboard carefully in time order. Each photo was well annotated with information about the date, the place and my companions in the photo. I also put the tour schedule on the last page of the photo album as an appendix.

After that, however, I rarely organize my photos in such careful way.

Unlike the enthusiastic informants mentioned above, most of the informants said that they are too busy and too lazy to annotate or arrange their photos carefully. One of the informant families originally put all of their photos in a big brown paper bag. One day when they tried to rearrange their photos into big photo albums, it was hard for them to organize the photos chronologically. Therefore, some of the photos in their photo albums were not arranged in time order, and that bothered them when they flipped the photo albums. Other families also have some loose old photos accidentally found in somewhere at home. These photos are usually later put in the blanks in the photo albums with neglect of their time relations with other photos in the albums. The neglect of the chronological order of photos would cause confusion when viewing photos several years later.

4.1.3 Photo Browsing

People rarely browse their old photos. The photos they browse more often are those taken or printed lately. Only when they want to find a specific photo or when they move their home, clean their room or reorganize their computer files, they may accidentally find their old photos and start to browse through them. However, once they start to browse the photos and memories of the old days emerge from the bottom of their heart, they cannot stop browsing.

Because viewing old photos reminds people the happiness in the old days. When one of the informants was asked about when she browses her old photos, she said:

When I want to put my photos in order or try to find a specific photo, I flip my old photos.

After I start to flip a photo album, I always can’t stop browsing another one.

However, people do not like to browse disordered photos shoved in big boxes. Photos without good management are not attractive. People are more willing to flip photos arranged orderly in the photo albums. Photos with well annotations are even more interesting to viewers.

4.1.4 Photo Sharing

People are interested in the photos that they are in. After people taking photos together at parties or tours, the one who took the photos share those photos with people who are in the photos. If they like those photos, the photographer will print a copy and mail to them or transmit the digital files to them. Besides sharing photos with the ones who are in the photos, people like to share photos of beautiful scenery on their trip with their family and friends. Old photos are shared when friends of the old days who come to visit. Some people like to share interesting photos with others who have common interests on the topic of the photos. One of the informants shares photos of special cars with his friend:

I: Whom do you share your photos with?

S1: The ones who are interested in the photo. For example, if I took a photo of an unusual car, I would share it with a friend of mine who is interested in cars.

People share photos of daily life experiences with their distant family members and friends to ease their yearning for them. However, young people are used to share photos in digital form through the Internet while middle-aged people are used to browse printed ones.

Therefore, parents who are unfamiliar with computer operation could hardly see photos from their children not at home.

4.1.5 Photo Display

A few types of photos meaningful to a family are commonly displayed at home: first,

family photos are taken on important days for the family such as wedding anniversaries and birthdays; second, photos which represent each period of the family and reflect the changes of the family such as wedding photos, children's photos in their early childhood, and photos of children's each graduation ceremony (See Figure 7); third, the achievements of family members, for example, photos of a member in the family winning a prize or standing on the top of high mountains; and fourth, photos of deceased family members. Most families like to display these photos in places they usually stay or pass through such as the living room and the hallway. One of the informants displays photos of her children on a bookshelf in the hallway between the living room and the bedroom:

M1: I put the photo frames of my children at eye-catching places. While my daughter studied abroad and my son was drafted into military service, I often looked at these photo frames.

Therefore I put the photo frames at places that I pass through many times a day.

Figure 7 (on the left) Photos reflecting the changes of a family Figure 8 (on the right) A photo of a family member’s achievement

On the one hand, People display photos in order to see the photos and the people in the photos more often; on the other hand, the display of family photos would leave an impression of a happy family to relatives and friends come to visit. The displayed photos are usually framed. The photos in the frames are rarely replaced, and the photo frames are rarely moved.

Most of the photo frames at home are gifts from relatives and friends or a premium of other merchandise. Only few people buy photo frames for themselves. The preference of photo frames differs from person to person. Some people like fancy photo frames as decorations at home while some other people like simple and elegant photo frames that emphasize the photos inside. (See Figure 9)

Figure 9 Photo frames in various forms

One of the informant families is having trouble with displaying their new photos. At present, they display seven pieces of family photo collages instead of enlarged photos on the wall of their hallway in order to display a lot of favorite photos at the same time. (See Figure 7) However, as the new photos keep increasing, they are lacking of space to display their new photo collages. They want to extend the room for photo display, but the size of the wall is limited, and spreading photos on walls beyond the hallway may affect the function of other rooms in the house.