Why You Shouldn’t Wait to Print out Your Photos
Albums & Prints That Make Your Home Your Happy Place
Photos were made to be held, to be flipped through in albums and to be seen every day on your wall like works of art. In this blog we’ll talk about how you can turn your digital files into prints that will decorate your home, tell your story and delight your family.
When you invest in a professional photo session at Reflections of Life Photography, don’t let the precious memories slip out of your hands (and right into your iPhoto folder where they’ll never be seen again).
As soon as your session is over, I will:
● Help you design an heirloom photo album
● Print your favourite photos
● Curate the perfect gallery wall (and install it for you too!)
I’m here to help you turn your photos into works of art that tell your family story and make your home your happy place. Read on to see how!
Turning Your Photo Session into Photos:
You’ve booked your next photo session with Reflections of Life photography, that’s wonderful!
You’ve been looking forward to your photo session for weeks. I’ve sent you your welcome gift, and I’ve helped you plan every detail of the session so you have nothing to stress about. You’re counting down the days until someone does your hair and makeup, gets you all dressed up, and tells you how beautiful you are. (When was the last time that happened? Your wedding day? You deserve that kind of love every day.)
Your kids are excited to come back and play with the toys at the Reflections of Life studio. You arrive at the studio and the session unfolds so naturally. You aren’t worried about your kids at all, because they are safe and free to be themselves in the studio. Your husband tells you how pretty you look and your family photo experience is loving and dreamy – as if you’re all living inside a glittering snow globe for a few moments.
Even the rest of the day goes smoothly as you relax into your afternoon and evening all together, wanting to snuggle and make the cozy feeling last.
And then the next morning, the 5 a.m. alarm goes off (aka. Your baby’s cry). You trip over toys on the floor. You’re immediately pummelled with questions like “Mom, what’s for breakfast?”, “Mom what are we doing today?”, “Maawwwwmmm, where are you? I need help!”
Your poor foggy brain does its best to rip open the curtains, put on some clean clothes and start showing up the best you can for another day.
But Mama, while you’re managing all that, I want you to know that I’m showing up for you another day too.
After your photo session, I’ll be thoughtfully preparing your photo memories for you to print out. As I do so, I’ll be thinking of you, praying for you, and truly understand the challenges you’re facing in motherhood. I’ll be making sure your joyful memories will become high-quality photos that you can look back on – every. single. day.
Why? So you can remember that those snow-globe magic moments are available to you whenever you need them.
The Aasmans turned their gorgeous family milestone session into a leather-bound heirloom album for their home. Flipping through the pages of individual and family shots can now be a tangible experience for their kids can enjoy throughout the years. What a beautiful stage of life to capture in photos!
I Do Your Photos Right the First Time: :
With 15 years of experience creating unforgettable photography experiences for my clients, I know how to get breathtaking photos with every click of my camera. Because I’ve handled everything from lighting to wardrobe to set the scene all ahead of time, your family’s natural beauty shines through. This means that you can have your photos back within four to six weeks of your photo session.
The photos around your home are there to remind you that your story is always unfolding into something breathtaking… especially on the days when it feels like you’ve lost the plot.
When your photos are this important, I have a high standard of the photography moments I create, so that you can take home photos that fill you with good feelings.
Your family photos should:
● Look amazing in your home
● Fill you with good feelings every time you see them
● Remind you of the beauty to be found in each stage of motherhood
● Make you and your family feel seen, loved, and valued
After you’ve chosen your photos in your Image Reveal, I’ll get right to work preparing your albums and framed prints.
This leads me to advise: Don’t put off printing out your photos.
When those 5 a.m. mornings and lunchtime messes add up, it’s easy to let the time slip out of our hands. We get busy, our children continue growing, and you don’t want to miss out on enjoying the magic of this stage before the next one sneaks up on you.
You didn’t book your session to have more digital photo files in your life. You booked your session so you can illustrate your family story and share them in your home.
After your photo session, we’ll create a beautiful heirloom photo album and framed prints so you can decorate your home with these good memories as soon as possible.
Just look at the beautiful way we can curate a sophisticated photo wall for your home. Combining the right professional frame with a selection of photo albums can become a fantastic colour palette to work with for the rest of the wall. These fall family photos made an extraordinary accent wall for the Berlingieris!
Benefits of Bringing Home Your Photos Right Away:
● I’ll be there to help you make decisions and assemble everything – no stress!
● It makes your family photography tradition a more seamless experience from capturing the moment to happily seeing it on your walls.
● Your portraits will remind you of the beauty to be found in every moment of this season.
● You don’t have to live with that nagging to-do list item that’s all too easy to keep putting off.
● You help your kids see themselves in a beautiful light as they grow up and enter each new stage of their life, helping each child feel seen and valued through every stage.
● They’re a continual reminder to stay in the moment … not to fast-forward your way through any of it, even on the challenging days. Take the joys and challenges as they come, because as Brené Brown says:
“We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.”
The start of a new story. We’ll find the perfect combination of decor and photos to create a stunning nursery wall for your maternity photography! What a beautiful beginning to a wall that will grow with newborn photography, baby milestone photography – and growing family photography. Your baby will always know how loved they were before they were even born.
Somewhere Between a Polaroid Photo and an iPhone Photo is the Perfect Photo:
Polaroid photos are a fun accessory for guests at a wedding. Photos on your phone are really convenient. But here’s the thing – it’s become so easy to digitally capture moments of our life on our phones that we take these moments for granted. Our photo folders in our phones are thousands of photos deep … beautiful memories buried beneath accidental screenshots, and multiple attempts at selfies we never ended up posting.
We seemed to have skipped over the real magic of a photograph.
The perfect photo is intentionally made, thoughtfully selected and is turned into art with quality materials. One seamless process.
And yet, our precious moments keep being instantly captured, and instantly forgotten.
Studies show that the average person has around 630 photos on their phone.
As a photographer, it breaks my heart to think of the millions of memories lying dormant on our devices. Another study says that less than half of people ever print their photos at all.
Sweet friend, your memories aren’t disposable. They’re once-in-a-lifetime moments that deserve to be handled and preserved with love.
We need to find a balance between taking photos, and savouring them.
We may have the power to take thousands of photos, but if we don’t give ourselves the freedom to cherish them, we lose out on a sense of our family story.
The Friedrichs’ family newborn photography session became a stunning collection of album and framed wall art. We curated a selection of photos that told a story for their newborn photo album, as the photos progress through family and individual shots of sweet little Navy. See how the albums beautifully display photos in unique ways? These custom albums create a captivating viewing-experience by designing layouts that stretch across multiple pages, or pair the perfect sequence-photos together.
From Photo Session to Photo Prints
One Seamless Process
Step 1: Book your photo session with Reflections of Life Photography
Step 2: Rest and relax! I’ll coordinate the details of hair, makeup, location and wardrobe
Step 3: Enjoy a calm photo session where you feel beautiful and confident
Step 4: Select heirloom photo pieces for your home
What a transformation when your digital files are transformed into beautiful pieces of wall art! We’ll find the perfect frame and mat to match your interior design. When you have maternity, newborn and baby milestone photography done with Reflections of Life you can end up with a gallery wall that captures the first year of growth with your baby. What a story to tell and share on your walls.
Image Reveals:
One week after your photo session we’ll get together again to look through your digital files! It’s such a lovely time to see your growing family on the big screen, and have fun turning them into art for your home. We’ll look through fabric swatches, match colours and decide which photos look best beside each other for your gallery walls. Feel free to bring fabric swatches or paint colours from your home so we can decide what frames and albums will work the best!
I’ve talked to so many moms who are intimidated by the final step in the photography process – choosing your photos!
That’s why I’ve made photo selection and creation a part of my photography process at Reflections of Life. Because you don’t need to add more decisions-to-make to your life. I’ll help you bring the overwhelm-odometer to zero.
When you join me at your Image Reveal, I can help you get everything sorted out right away so you don’t have to deal with the heavy lifting later. I will help you:
● Curate a collection for your photo albums that tell a compelling family story.
● Pick the best combination of photos for your gallery wall at home (certain photo angles look best beside each other when creating a compilation of photos – I want to help you make sure you get the photos you want in a skillfully arranged way).
● Install your gallery wall – Trust me, DIY-ing a photo gallery wall from scratch is tough, and very time-consuming! You have to pick out the right-sized, matching frames, cut out cardboard pieces to experiment with, puzzle-your-way through different arrangements … you don’t need to spend time on that! Over 15 years, I’ve become an expert at designing and installing gallery walls so that you don’t have to! We’ll pick out everything together and I’ll come to your home to install it.
● We’ll look through my collection of fabrics for your photo albums and frame options for your wall prints.
I love having Image Reveal sessions with my clients; the look in your eyes as you delight in your new photos is absolutely priceless.
You’ll get to enjoy watching that same look in your family’s eyes when you take home photos for them to see.
Choosing the Right Materials
Want a glimpse into what fabrics and materials I offer for your albums and prints?
1) For Your Heirloom Albums:
The photo albums I create for you are handcrafted albums made in Canada. You can choose between premium fabrics of linen or leather, as well as a cameo photo cover or an embossed cover.
See the photos below to start browsing:
When you are choosing the style for your 10x10 heirloom photo album, you’ll have a variety of linen and leather fabrics to choose from. I’ve helped design many gorgeous photo corners in my client’s houses with albums and gallery walls – I’d love to help you too!
2) For Your Prints:
Professionally framing your photo prints is so important. When you have high-quality frames for your prints, you’ll know that your photos are safe from sun damage and will pass the test of time. Choosing the right style and colour of frame is what can turn your photos into true masterpieces. Take a look at the various styles, colours and textures I offer:
There are a variety of professional frames and custom mats to choose from when you turn your digital files into fine wall art. We’ll find the colour, style and material that will suit your home best!
What Photography is Meant to Be:
Your photos aren’t time capsules, they’re like the soundtracks to your everyday life.
When I was in grade school, I remember my teacher doing a time-capsule project with our class. Time capsules can be a fun way to engage with our future selves, but the thing is … I don’t even remember what happened to it. The time capsule is a fleeting moment, one that is meant to get buried away and forgotten. It will bring a moment of delight when reopening and then abandoned again soon after.
Photography on the other hand, it’s meant to be enjoyed like a soundtrack in a movie – seamlessly woven into every scene, naturally drawing out the emotions of the characters and enriching our experience of the story.
Your family photos are not meant to be items for a time capsule – something you make now and hide away until years later. Your family, baby, newborn photos are meant to be the artwork that travels with you through your life, as a constant visual reminder to stay in this moment.
A great photo session will help you be present in the moment to capture it. Great, up-to-date photos help you live in the present and savour it every single day.
Conclusion:
Printing your photos after your photo session is an important way to make your photography a seamless experience from dreaming of your photos to bringing them to your home. I’m here to help you every step of the way while you choose the best photos, albums and frames to preserve your memories.
If you want to create something beautiful like this for your home and family, message me. I'd love to give you more information on booking a portrait session here at Reflections of Life.
Client Testimonial
“Karen has been our photographer for the last 5 years! She has taken newborn photos of our last 3 children, first birthday photos, as well as family photo sessions. It is very difficult in this digital age to remind yourself to keep and print those photos that really matter and we are so happy and thankful for Karen and the work that she does. Because of her, we have beautiful prints and albums that will someday be given to our children. Karen is very professional and is amazing with our children. I love that when I tell my children now that we are going to see Karen, they know who we are speaking about. Karen has watched our children grow over the years and is able to capture those changes in a way that we can't. We can't say enough about her work and we will continue booking sessions with her in the years to come.” - Carlin Friedrich
Want to shop the studio wardrobe?
Hi there, I'm Karen! I am obsessed with newborn baby yawns, giggling kids, and jumpsuits. I'm a mama of four who understands the busyness of everyday life. I've learned to love and enjoy it through lifestyle photography. I know what it’s like to look back on my children’s first years and feel like they flew by so quickly. I don’t want any other mamas to forget what their baby’s little fingers and toes looked like all curled up. My hope is that I can help you create albums and prints to serve as physical reminders of these sweet times throughout your baby’s early years. Contact me for info.
