On Christmas Eve, our family lost an amazing person. Jon’s Grandma B lived a long and wonderful life, and she left us with a great legacy of faith and character. After her memorial service, we spent hours at his uncle & aunt’s home, looking through countless boxes of her tangible legacy of the family…hundreds upon hundreds of photographs, some dating back to the early 1900s. As we looked through such precious photographs, my brother-in-law commented, “This next generation probably won’t ever get to do this.” He was touching on the sad fact that, while more photographs are being taken today than at any other point in history, very few of them anymore ever appear on anything other than Facebook or a computer screen. The tangible photograph is fading away in our fascination with the digital age and our ever-growing busyness to life and our false sense of security that some file exists on a hard drive (that very well may crash and fail). Yet, if we stop and think about it, we all know that there’s something infinitely more valuable and special about a photograph you can hold in your hand or enjoy daily hanging in your home. A photograph connects new generations to old, holds a piece of history, represents legacy, and tugs on our heartstrings. A photograph can instantly take us back to a memory and all the emotions of the moment or can remind us of personalities and things we want to remember from different stages as our kids grow up. In today’s world of digital, we obviously get many calls from people who are just looking for a disc of files from a session. It’s something we just don’t do. Yes, we know how important social media is, and that’s why all of our families will always have some web-sized social sharing files from their session for those things. And yes, you can choose to purchase your session files, but never as the only thing you leave with from a session. We love many of the positives from digital photography, and there are many great benefits, but let’s not keep everything exclusively digital. When you choose professional photography, you’re investing time and energy into creating beautiful portraits of your family. We want you to therefore have something beautiful and special from that session. If you create beautiful portraits but they never get seen and enjoyed, what was the point? If you have the same one-hour-processed 4×6 prints you have from your day-to-day pictures, what elevates the professional pictures into something truly special? We want to run counter-culture and provide tangible legacy to our families. We want to create art of your family. We know that what we do today will outlive all of us, and that makes what we do incredibly special and important. We choose to come alongside our families and not only create quality portraits but also create quality prints, wall art, and albums so that these families have something to pass down to future generations. More and more I’m noticing families comment when they open their order and hold their prints or album in hand, “These look so much better now than on the screen” and “I can’t believe how different it is to hold these than when I looked at them on the iPad.” Holding something in your hand brings connection and makes everything real, and there’s something truly special about that.
– Lindsay
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A handful of some favorites from Jon’s family’s photographs…
Jonathan Betz Photography – Colorado Springs Professional Photographer
[…] We LOVE Canon‘s new line of ads showing why printing pictures and creating tangible items matters in our highly digital world. We’ve always been committed to providing all of our client families access to ordering from a full and exciting line of professional quality prints and products so that every session we do leaves that family with legacy pieces for the home. Whether or not you realize it now, experiencing a photograph in print is a different and a more meaningful experience than on a screen. You can read more about this and learn about the heart of our business from a post we did earlier this year following the loss of Jon’s Grandma B [Professional Photography & Your Family’s Legacy]. […]
Because of my experience working in an Archives, I can attest to the invaluable role printed photos play in documenting and preserving history because of it’s longevity and simplicity. Something printed on paper – as long as it’s stored in a suitable environment – will last for at least a hundred years or more, and also, printed items obviously do not require special equipment to view them (like digital requires some sort of electronic device). Having high quality digital copies of those photos is an invaluable thing – it’s a way to protect from permanent loss if something should ever happen to the physical copy (e.g. fire, water damage, etc). But digital should be used as the back-up rather than the primary storage and display media.
Heather – Thank you for your unique perspective on this! Apologize that your comment wasn’t seen and posted by us earlier!