We Believe in Photography
We Believe
We believe in photography—but more than that, We believe in photographs. Printed photographs are tangible. We can hold on to them, pass them around, frame them and hang them on a wall. We can make albums to be treasured and looked through by children for years to come.
We can’t touch a file, and the truth is we don’t know the longevity of a file or if we will even be able to find it someday. A digital file is a bit of a mystery—if it’s lost, where did it go? If a drive is damaged, what happens to the files? How many people truly back up all their images?
What happened to disc cameras, eight-track tapes, Walkmans, and other technology we thought would last forever? What will our children be looking at in 20 or 30 years? Photographs are special—files are not!
We believe in printing our work professionally. We believe our work is more than a screensaver. Years of studying and perfecting my craft come down to more than sending files via the internet.
The photographs that we create for our clients are not only precious to our clients, they are also precious to us. It is our work, a lifetime of work that deserves to be printed.
Photographs are passed on to children and grandchildren. Can you imagine a floppy disk, a DVD or a flash drive sitting in a frame representing your family portraits?
Like many photographers we have struggled with bending to the needs or wants of a clientele that is looking for files. But this is what we discovered over the last year—it makes us uncomfortable in the center of my gut to hand over digital files, no matter the price. Clients have told me that the DVD is still sitting on a desk and they should have had me make the prints in the first place because they never have time to get to it.
We often wonder about those files that were sold…How were they printed? Did the client crop it too tight? Is the color correct? Did they attempt to alter the image? It troubles us because we put so much of ourselves into our work. And, we have to wonder…are we really acting as professionals and serving our client the best way that we know how to by simply selling intangible files that may never be printed?
For some, it’s easy…take some photos, edit them, burn them on a disk or flash-drive, and make a few bucks. We don’t and can’t operate that way—we care too much about our work, about our clients and future generations that might have no photographs because we wanted to make fast and easy money selling files.
We are taking a stand! We are photographers! We are without a doubt passionate about creating photographs—real pictures, printed on professional paper—and beautiful albums. We want your children, their children, our children and future grandchildren looking at and holding onto photographs, not the latest greatest gadget.
It has taken deep soul searching, a lot of thought and time, to define the value of our work. We are taking a stand against selling files and taking a strong stand for printing our photographs.
If being a business owner and photographers today means the current market will force us to sell files not photographs and to compromise our work and our values—well then, we are out.
But, that won’t happen! We know it won’t because we know there are people and clients who value our work, understand and respect the value that we have placed on our work, and actually want photographs.
We are David and Susan, professional photographers—We believe in and value photography and the images we leave for our children. Our work and your portraits will be professionally printed to our standards, they will be available to frame and look at in albums…
The portraits that we create for you will not become a part of your screensaver slideshow.
We have worked too hard and taken too much pride in our work for that to happen. We will not take the risk that in 20 years we will be a generation of lost photographs.
There We stand!
