As technology continues to improve in our culture, we sometimes forget what life was like without a cell phone, social media, and GPS. I remember having a plan with my parents as a kid to call from a pay phone, let it ring twice, then hang up to let them know I was ready to be picked up from somewhere. Instead of social media, we would pass and receive notes in class in desperate hopes we wouldn't get caught by teachers who were willing to read them out loud to the class. Yes, the check yes or no thing really would happen; that is not a myth. As far as GPS goes, it has become so accessible, I wonder how many people from this generation can use a map to get themselves from point A to point B anymore. I am not making fun of anybody or trying to give the "walking ten miles up hill both ways to school through fifteen feet of snow" talk; I just remember when the toughest thing about road maps was folding them back up (which I am still terrible at). The point I want to make is, although technology has made life easier in so many ways, there are certain things we shouldn't lose. Photography is one of them.

As a photographer, a dad, a son, and a husband, I am big on making prints available to clients and highly encourage other photographers to do the same when asked. We live in a digital age where social media images saturate our phones, computers, clouds, and the world wide web. Pictures are admired for a few days and then often forgotten about as they are buried by the latest set of duck lips with your "bestie". This is okay for snap shots, but what about senior and family pictures? One of the reasons we encourage prints during your senior session, is so those memorable moments don't get buried. They may not get buried by duck lips, but what happens when you get the disc from your senior photographer and you lose it? What happens when you get the disc and decide to print off what you want from Walgreens and there are fingers cut off because the size ratio is different? There are many good photographers out there who choose to do digital only. That is their choice and I am not discounting them with what I am about to say because everybody has reasons for why they do what they do. To spend all this time with our clients, getting to know them, taking their pictures, editing them, showing them, then giving them a disc of images is like saying, "Thanks, good luck the rest of the way". To me an image isn't complete until it's printed; its a start to finish thing with me.