When I Realized Portrait Prints Are Important...

When I started my photography business, I knew I wanted to do things outside of the industry standard. Since the onset of digital images becoming the most accessible form of pictures, the way we both view and store our images has changed, and I'm not too sure it's for the better.

Digital images are awesome and important, don't get me wrong. I have 7000+ images on my phone (that's not including what I have saved in separate apps or on my laptop 😬). But I think we forget about the importance of having tangible pictures that we can hold and enjoy.

Here's my story:

I am the eldest of three children, and my sister is the middle child. Now, because I am not only the eldest child, but also the eldest grandchild on both sides of our family, there are a loooot of pictures of me as a baby and kid. And I have all of them in 4x6 prints stored in envelopes or organized into albums. I'm talking hundreds of prints! I also have this beautiful framed image of my mom and I when I was a baby that is displayed in my home office. It's a bit beat up over 20 years later, but I still love it:)

My sister, however, doesn't have that. Like, not a single album or print or anything. (Cue: Middle Child Syndrome 😬 kidding, not kidding 😂).

Now, for those of you who might know me or my family, you can probably guess this wasn't the case. My sister was not excluded from having baby photos taken because she's the middle child. But she really did believe that there were little to no pictures of her as a kid because.........

There was no tangible evidence.

See, the transition from film to digital images just so happened to occur in the five years between the time I was born and the time she was born. So even though my mom actually has just as many pictures of my sister as she does of me (maybe even more because it's easier to take lots of digitals!), my sister never would have known it until she confronted my mom with her (lack of) evidence. The difference is that almost all of the pictures of my sister are on my mom's hard drive instead of in albums, envelopes, and frames.

My mom had to sift through years of digital images and files to find the pictures of my sister so she could send them to her, where as I know exactly where my baby albums are stored and could have them in my hands in seconds. And all of that, just for my sister to go and print them off anyways!!

It was after this had all occurred a couple years ago that I realized: no family is going to gather around the computer to click through digital images of Baby. Or wedding images. Or whatever it might be. But many families will gather around a photo album to flip through the pages and reminisce together!

Once that favourite family photo is replaced with a new, updated family photo as your phone's wallpaper, it can very easily get lost in the mix of hundreds or thousands of other digital images and files. But if that image is in a frame on your wall or shelf, you can continue to enjoy it every day for a lot longer! And they never feel "outdated" --- at some point it just changes from being a recent photo to a memory photo, and both are so important!

Your kids are depending on you to have tangible art of their younger years so that they can see it too:)