I remember growing up and looking at my mom’s photo albums she had in our basement.  Photos of her and my dad in their early years of dating.  Then the photos that captured their wedding day, my dad strutting in his cowboy boots in all their glory.  I loved seeing the photos of my grandma & grandpa when they got married.  Simple, yes.  But a single photo felt like it spoke so loudly of that moment, frozen in time.

I can usually find at the majority of weddings I photograph, a long table right before you enter the ceremony or reception displaying the history of weddings that led up to the one happening that day.  I hear guests laughing over the fact that the father of the bride actually did have hair back in the day.  I hear the oohh’s and aahh’s of the glamorous photos of the grooms grandmother back when she was merely 18 for her wedding day.

They’re all memories, captured, printed and shared with generations after them.  It got me to thinking…what about our generation?  The generation of Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.  Where you can take a picture and upload it instantly into the world.  It’s how we seem to communicate these days.  But it made me think….am I going to bust out my iPhone to my grandchildren and share the adventures Brandon and I went on in the early years of our marriage?  Will I have to get on the computer to share the photos of our rainy (but still my favorite day ever) June wedding?  New technology will replace what we have now.  But it never will replace the feeling of a photograph in your hands.  Seeing the edges beginning to soften as the years have gone by.  The color fading as it sat in a frame by the window for 25 years.

Instant sharing is convenient and fast (and I’m a photographer, so obviously I love posting photos that I can instantly share with everyone!)….but is it forever?  For all of you out there who have gotten married…or maybe the date is quickly approaching; how are you going to share your moments to your children down the road?  With photographers handing over digital files so easily nowadays, it makes me sad to think that a majority of those photos stay right on that flash drive.  They’re not printed or placed in albums.

I want to sit with my grandchildren when I’m 80 years old and show them how young Brandon and I looked when we got married in the foothills of Colorado.  I want to show my granddaughter someday the people who stood beside us on that day or hear her laugh at how outdated my dress became.

I’ve started to think about all of this after I received my sample album in the mail about a month ago.  There was something so exciting to open a package, touch the album, turn the pages and actually see the photos in my hands.  So I’ve made a promise to myself this year:  I’m going to print more photos that tell the story of this year, of my life.  I want to have albums piling up in my home and photos filling my frames of people and moments I never want to forget.