If you haven’t seen them, I put up a number of shots from last weekend’s family Yosemite trip in my flickr que. I may still highlight a couple of them here, but for now, I’ll leave them be.

In the process of thinking of ways to get my parents some of the digital shots I took, especially considering that my dad isn’t much of a techie (they’re still on 28.8k free dialup at home), I thought about going with an online service to have a few printed and mailed to my parents. In the process of looking for a good service, I happened on Walgreen’s site, where I found that they allow uploading of digital photos with printing and pickup at any store. You just upload your photos, at whatever resolution (although for a 4×6 1600×1200 at 300dpi is plenty), choose what sizes you want printed (4×6, 5×7, 8×10, or poster sizes), pay with your favorite piece of plastic, and pick up you photos a couple of hours later at a Walgreen’s of your choosing. Pretty darn simple.

To be fair, there are a number of other places that have the same type of service (all are priced around $0.19/print, with the exception of Sams Club, at $0.11/print), but since my family has had prints made at Walgreens for a number of years now with good results, I thought I would suprise my parents. I uploaded 50 of the better shots from the weekend (I took about 1000), had them printed at the Walgreens in my home town (1300 miles away in TX), and waited for my parents to get off their plane back to Dallas. I called them soon thereafter, and let them know there would be a suprise waiting for them when they stopped to drop off their film for developing. You can imagine their suprise when 50 photos were waiting for them at the counter, even as they were dropping off their first rolls to be developed.

They said the quality of the prints was excellent. I’m a bit more picky than they, so I had some of my better shots from the past 6 months of D70 heaven printed at my local Walgreens this morning. Much to my suprise, the quality was incredible. There was no telling that they were digital and not film, and moreover, some of the shots that were taken at 1600ISO didn’t look very grainy. Taking a 3000×2000 shot and shrinking it to 1600×1200 helps, but I was still impressed.

After getting home, I realized how much I miss having prints. Digital has taken the tactile element away from photography, even the smell of the paper was new again. Crazy, sure. But I know that I’ll take the time now to print a shot or two every now and then, even if the prints just end up in a box on the shelf.