Are Pictures Important?

In our digital age where we want everything in an instant, are taking and printing family photographs even important anymore? With a camera at our fingertips we take images at family outings all the time. We store them in the cloud, timehop reminds us of images from 1, 2, 4, 10 years ago. But is that good enough?  

Should we print these images, YES!

How long has it been since you’ve sat down and printed images you took on your phone or from a family session? You told yourself you’d get to it, but 6 months has flown by! Too often I think a whole year passes and we don’t do anything with our images.

I’m guilty of putting off my personal work too, last year it took me a whole year to create our family album.

As funny and typical as this seems, I see this scenario happening all the time!! Don't you worry, I'm working on something to combat this epidemic for my future family, senior and newborn sessions. More on that coming soon. :)

For today, I'm discussing the overall importance of just printing the images. There are a host of examples I could give you, but 3 really stand out to me.

1. Photographs Create a Sense of Belonging to your children. When they see images in their home of your arms wrapped around them, you loving on them, you adoring their silly beautiful face it fills their little love bucket up. This is hands down the easiest way for them to see that you love them on an hourly basis. It probably comes as no surprise that we have pictures everywhere in our home. In fact, when we sold our home in Glen Carbon our realtor said we needed to take a few of our larger ones down to depersonalize (duh). However, when we walked down one hallway she said "You can leave those, they just look like art." Yep, ART. I think I laughed out loud and said "Well, they are art!" Done right, it's just adding a little sprinkle to your cookie.

(Fact: Teresa Klokkenga Photography use to be called Love the Light Photography before I was getting confused with another local photography company)

2. This ones a hard truth, but printed pictures are the one thing you'll stop and go through when a loved one passes away. Everyone always wishes they had more pictures (or maybe just one picture) with their loved one. Don't waste that sacred time now, get in the picture. You want them to remember the feel of that embrace in the image and the adoring look on your face more than the thought of you not wanting to be there. By not getting in the image you are teaching them that they not worth getting in the image with and will most likely do this to their children one day too.

3.) For families with a high school senior, this might be the last opportunity you have for a professional portrait or family portrait before their wedding day. GASP, I know. Once they go off to college we kind of stop getting those yearly images because life goes into fast forward.

All joking aside, I do think you should be printing your images. I try and print off our family snapshots about every 3 months and we store them in a picture box. Periodically we get them out and go back through them, it's a hoot to relive those moments. 

Quick questions for those of you who read this all the way through (thank you!), what has kept you from ordering your images? If your answer is time and you had the option to pre-design your wall space before you session, would you?