Happy New Year from Bella Vita Photography (and a quick update)

Well, I am soooo far behind on this blog it’s beyond ridiculous!  We’ve had a busy holiday season, and unfortunately I also lost my grandfather over the New Year’s weekend.  My grandfather raised me, so he was essentially my father… and we were extremely close.  He was also close to my two children, and my oldest son looked up to him as his only father figure for many years while I was a single mom (until I met & married my husband about 5 years ago).  It was a really difficult time, but it did highlight one thing that I had somehow forgotten, even being a photographer.  The importance that a single photograph can hold.  It’s easy to lose sight of this, even when you’re a photographer, and sometimes especially when you’re a photographer.  We take thousands of pictures a week sometimes.  Hundreds of thousands a year.  In our busiest season, we have to remind ourselves sometimes that we love what we do.  It’s no different than anything else.  We can become overworked & lose sight of the big picture.  In fact, that is one of my main New Year’s resolutions… to stay busy, but not so busy I stop loving what I do, and not so busy that I lose sight of what it’s all really about.

In the days after my grandfather’s passing, it was a therapeutic blessing to be able to sit around their kitchen table sifting through pictures.  Old pictures, new pictures, professional pictures, snapshots, torn pictures, carefully mounted pictures.  They all hold a special meaning.  Of course, some held up better than others, but I couldn’t help but also feel a sudden urge to send everything on my hard drives & discs at home to the print lab.  What will our children be doing 50 years from now?  Hopefully not sitting around some computer looking at digital copies.  There was something really awesome about running my fingers over the edges of every single picture.  Holding the same picture they held, they got in the mail, that they got handed down to them from their aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, mother, father, etc.

It’s really a lost part of our culture, the printed photograph.  It was amazing to see some of the old pictures, and how they’ve changed.  A huge stack of polaroids, which completely confused my children.  Little flip books from the 20’s, which have been lost in our “bigger, better” culture.  It’s just so amazing.

And really, now… all we have left are those pictures.  A few other sentiments… but his generation didn’t keep much “stuff”, not to mention it’s really his face, those pictures of him loving his grand children & great grandchildren that I really want to hold on to.

And so – that’s another resolution of mine – I am printing every single picture I take of my kids.  I want those prints.  Forget the discs (I’ll still archive them, I am a techie deep down beneath it all).  But, I want prints.  Boxes and boxes of pictures, for my children to sit around with, and wonder what on earth we were thinking with that hair do, that outfit, that car, that kitchen wall paper design.

For my clients, friends & family who do want to make sure that they’ll have a print that will last, that looks great now (and later)… I usually recommend a consumer lab:  MPIX.  But please, if for no other reason, consider having a big box of family prints… don’t even consider a disc for your main way of keeping pictures, as an archive perhaps, but not your main archive.  Get prints.  Put them in a box.  And every once in a while, sit around the kitchen table and reminisce

And just for grins, here is the last image I have of my grandfather with my two kids:

Stay tuned, I’ll be catching up on blogs & such soon!