Tell me I’m not the grossest mother ever. Or don’t.
Honestly, after 21.5 years as a mom, I don’t really care what people think.
Which is a darn good thing.
As I sent my 9 year old off to the shower just now
on August 18th [Read more…]
Your hard drive is not where your photos belong!
Let me guess . . . you take hundreds, maybe thousands, of photos every year. Your kids, your friends, your life . . . and they sit and sit and sit . . . on your hard drive, on your laptop, in your phone. Your kids, who aren’t on FaceBook (trust me, they aren’t, even if they’re teenagers!), think that photos are this thing that whizzes by, to be looked at one moment, forgotten the next. They might pick up an old album from your childhood and wonder where their albums are.
I know this because I live it. I know this because I hear it. I know this because I have been hired by some of you to help you fix it!
Got these cute boxes off Amazon.com
It’s just hard, managing gigabyte upon terabyte of data, otherwise known as your memories. This summer I vowed to make an album. To sort through just this short ten weeks of summer break, edit and organize, assemble an album and ORDER it for Pete’s sake! Because we don’t have any family albums. There are no tangible memories to look through, dang it!
I did okay, at first. Sadly, after 4 days of ignoring my actual job, I gave up. I just don’t have time right now. Yet . . . I refused to let go of my vision. My vision of my kids looking through the photos from this summer, maybe on a cold winter day, or maybe two years from now, sitting on the sofa together, remembering. So, I hatched a brilliantly simple plan. Just print them already!
So simple. So obvious. So not what I’ve done since 2005 when I picked up my first DigitalSLR.
I did it. I grabbed 150 photos from this summer, I ordered prints, I bought cute boxes to toss them in, willy-nilly style, because why pretend they’ll stay organized when i know they won’t.
I got her done.
See those organized stacks? Eh, nevermind. . .
I spent a long time coming up with my organizational techniques. lol
Now, your turn! Just do it. Print those babies so your babies will be able to look back and realize that photos are meant to be enjoyed, touched, loved, remembered. They belong in real life! I bought the boxes off Amazon and you can get adorable 4×5 prints like this from Mpix, the consumer lab of my professional one.
48 years of marriage and this couple has found the secret to lasting love.
What is the secret to lasting love? The list of possible answers could go on and on. For one Northern California couple the secret was so simple it took me by surprise. When they contacted me last year to photograph the two of them at home I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. As a family photographer with a bent toward wild and crazy kids I struggled to imagine filling an entire album with photos of one older couple. I was delighted, though, to learn their vision for the shoot; to capture their relationship throughout a typical day, from their morning tea on the balcony to the kiss he gently plants on her sleeping cheek every night. Their love just shines through this unique and special gallery of the everyday.
So, their secret to lasting love? It’s in finding joy and beauty in one another, not just on a fancy date (although that is certainly a part of their strategy) but in the little moments that happen each day. How he makes her tea in the morning and how she fills their home with fresh flowers from the garden and the flavor and aroma of homemade soup. How they both dress up to go out on the town and how he carefully removes her glasses when she’s fallen asleep reading, again. Seems pretty simple, right? It is profound in it’s simplicity. It might be hard to achieve in our busy world of go go go, but after seeing this couple’s simple, beautiful daily-love, I for one (along with the love of my life) will be finding the beauty in the everyday.
