There is growing concern in the professional photography community about the current generation of children and whether or not they will have a photographic legacy of their childhoods. How can it be that the most photographed generation in history may have no photographic legacy??? The answer is simple: Their childhoods exist almost exclusively in digital format. Digital clutter, up in the cloud, on pieces of technology that will fail or become obsolete. A heartbreaking amount of times we hear in the portrait community of children who have lost their parents suddenly, and no one left behind knows how to access their digital data or cloud storage. An entire photographic documentation of their childhoods, the memories of them with their loved ones, all lost. It's a heartbreaking reality I've witnessed first hand as those left behind search for answers on how to recover memories of happier times, too often unsuccessfully.

So what can you do about it?

For the everyday snapshots of your lives, start printing them! Once a month, run through your camera roll and print off 10-15 (no, we don't need 50,000 prints, just a handful of the best) of your favorites and stick them in a coffee table album and then watch what happens... Little fingers will turn the pages of that album often as they laugh and remember days past. They will be viewed and enjoyed countless more times than if they were sitting on a hard drive or server somewhere. Remember, your prints are your legacy and your digital files are your backups, not the other way around. Print what matters; print what you want to preserve. 

For your professional portraits -- quality is greater than quantity. Have them created right; have them created classic & timeless, and have them created with archival quality materials. And remember, giving your children 8-10 amazing portraits of their childhood, ones that grace the walls of your home when they are little, but will live for generations once they're grown, is of far greater value than thousands of trendy, average images on CDs stuffed in drawers or stored as digital clutter. Our heirloom portrait paintings are designed to stand the test of time. We are now commissioning charcoal and pastel portrait paintings through the greater Raleigh area. This art is a perfect gift! Plan ahead and commission your heirloom this summer, and gift one of these classic childhood portraits to someone special this holiday season. 

 PROTECT THEIR PHOTOGRAPHS; THEY ARE THEIR LEGACY.