Making memories - Family Photographs

So I am currently in the process of making a photo story book for my daughter (pictured below).

My Mother passed away when I was in my teens and my 3 year old daughter is now getting curious about her Nanny that lives in the sky. I decided the best way to explain would be to create a book about my Mam and her life and share photos within it. This then got me thinking.

Everyone has a camera in their pocket nowadays. It’s on your phone. We have apps like Instagram and Pinterest that have been created purely to support photos and we all have a friend on our Facebook page who posts at least one selfie (now a recognised word in the Oxford dictionary!) a day.

So in this digital age when we have 100s of photos on our phone and floating around in the cloud, how many are printed and popped into albums? Food for thought….

I must admit, I am guilty of this myself. My phone is jammed of photos of my friends and my family but God forbid, should the cloud ever decide to crash and my phone be stolen, those memories are lost forever!

Even in my profession as a family photographer, I did a survey among my target clients as to whether they would like prints or digital files as part of their family portrait package, and overwhelming the result was they wanted digital files.

I have been lucky to have clients then send me photos of their beautiful images in gorgeous frames on display in their home. (By the way, I love this…. Send me more!) but then I wonder, do the other photos sit on the USB / CD in a drawer and never get printed out and displayed with pride around the home?

I know children change constantly, so a little tip is to buy a frame you can change the image within. Every year then you have an up to date image of your family. What to do with the prints you remove? Pop them in an album!

Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact we can back everything up to the cloud. Sadly when my Mam passed away I didn’t have many photos of the two of us together. Then a few house moves and a country move and things get misplaced. I have managed to gather a nice selection to share with my daughter but if the cloud had existed back in 1994, I would have 100s to share.

So…. To the point of my blog. Take lots of family photos. Digital is cheap! No processing costs (and you can delete the less flattering).

Take photos, but make sure you are in them too! A selfie stick now permits a whole family to be in one image. Not just Mum and the kids, or Dad and the kids. Everyone!

Take photos, treasure them and back them up to *the cloud. But…. Print them!

Make photobooks, photo albums or memory boxes. Imagine when the first boyfriend / girlfriend comes home and you can dig out the box of baby photos. As parents, one of our jobs is to embarrass our offspring… let’s do it properly :-)

And now, to keep with the theme, here are some images of me and my lovely Mam when I was alot younger!