Preserving Your Legacy: The Importance of Print

Why Printing Tangible Prints and Art Is Essential // Wedding Photographers in Huntsville, Alabama

Originally published April 7, 2016 / Updated March 24, 2022

This is actually a Tidbit I originally published on the blog back in 2016. It’s something I dug out, polished up, and am sharing again in a fresh way because it’s truly that important!

In our 10 years of photography, we’ve captured the wedding day moments of nearly 200 couples and photographed almost as many engagement sessions. We’ve snapped pictures at dozens of family sessions and a handful of senior and maternity. In other words, we’ve seen a lot of pictures pass through our memory cards and online galleries.

What strikes me more as the years pass by is the importance of doing something with your pictures. So important! So important that I’m putting this whole paragraph in bold!

In the past, our story went like this: we’d splurge a little extra on a photo session with a photographer we loved. The gallery came back and we were ecstatic! Amazing pictures, great experience. We plopped one onto that year’s Christmas card, posted a few on Instagram, and….that’s it. I’m sure we always meant to do something with them, but never got around to doing it. What should we do with them, anyway? Frame some prints on the mantle? Maybe a canvas in the dining room?

Decision overwhelm happened. We got busy and found ourselves putting it off for so long that we never actually did anything. The next session came around and it happened all over again!

After observing that trend with ourselves and many of our early couples, we realized how HUGE of a thing we were missing out on! The digitals are great, and that’s why we make sure you have them. But what about the tangible pieces of art that capture your story in a way that can actually be told?

Where Are They?

How many precious pictures collect dust on our hard drives? They never have a chance to be enjoyed and become a legacy. There’s a solid chance our kids and grandkids will never see them. Generations to come will be scrambling to find pictures from our generation because they’ll die on phones, hard drives, and forgotten cloud storage. Technology becomes obsolete over time (do you own a CD player or USB drive?), and with it our access to stored images.

Have you thought about that before? In 30 years, will our kids know where to access the thousands of pictures we have stashed on our phones or cloud accounts? Will our grandkids and great-grandkids have more than a handful of precious pictures of this digital age generation?

Time To Stop That Cycle!!

So what do we do?

The answer probably isn’t printing off every picture you own, as delightful as that would be. What we all need to be doing is preserving our legacy in thoughtful ways!

Our Favorite: Albums

Our favorite impact piece is the printed album. Whether its your engagement session, wedding day, or family portrait session, albums allow you to preserve many pictures from that timeframe or event in a compact place. You can pick out your favorites and the images that bring back important memories. Albums store easily on a shelf and work well as a collection!

We personally print an album for each year. Joel saves pictures throughout the months and compiles them in a yearly album that we print and add to our stack. We also print albums from each of our major trips: Italy, Banff/Glacier National Parks, Caribbean Cruise, Prince Edward Island/Nova Scotia. Just like with our family pictures, we keep our travel memories alive through our album collection.

How do you get an album from your session? Two options!

You can take the easy way and hand all the hard work over to your photographer (like us!). We’ll even create the initial design for you. All you have to do is let us know if there are any pictures you want to be changed out or design changes made. Everything is online and easy to do! We have a guide that walks you through the details. All of our wedding packages include an album (we believe in it THAT much!), and we also design albums for family sessions. We do all the hard work for you and provide personalized assistance along the way!

The second option is to do it yourself, which will save money as a bonus (but not time!). There are several consumer printing companies that offer albums in all sorts of styles and quality levels. If you’re on a budget and need to go this route, do it!

Runners Up: Framed Print Collections and Canvases

If you’re one of our J&A Couples, you know we love a good canvas collection or framed print collection! They’re pieces of art with an impact you don’t want to miss.

In our opinion, canvas collections are great for images you want to keep around long-term. Your wedding day, of course! Even engagement sessions are really timeless. For family sessions, we lean toward a framed print collection. Families change over the years as they grow. Framed print collections allow you to update the prints or easily add to the collection over the years.

For ourselves, we love a combination! We keep a handful of canvas collections around our house that we update every few years. We also have some framed prints that we update with each photo session. It’s the perfect strategy for us!

Now It’s Your Turn

It’s never too late! If you have wedding or family pictures on your hard drive still waiting to see the light of day, you can do something about it! You can print an album, order a canvas collection, or frame some prints!

We want these stories to be told over and over. We want you to see these stories, to share them, to laugh with them. Tangible prints preserve them in a way that a collection of digital images on a flash drive never could.

You may not realize now how valuable and irreplaceable your album is going to be, but you will. And we want to make sure you have a way to pass your story down to every generation. It’s a story they need to hear, a story that will give them a richer and deeper understanding of who they are and where they came from.

We’re not just wedding photographers; we’re preservers of your history and your legacy. And that’s a job we take very seriously.

*hugs*

Amber