This past weekend was filled with special moments! We are in a time when most of us, including me, pull out our cell phones for quick snapshots.

But this was an occasion when I pulled out my (gasp!) actual camera to capture wonderful memories!

I, of course, use my professional camera for my work. It’s my biggest and bestest 🙂 camera and it stays primarily in the studio. I took a slightly scaled down version this past weekend.

I used to pull out my camera all the time when my kids were little. Why did I stop? Perhaps it was because as they got bigger, they said, “No, Mom. No pictures.” I honestly can’t remember…. If I pulled out my camera on them randomly now, I would definitely get protests. I took TONS of pictures of my kids when they were in their high school sports…. It was fun to pull it out again this weekend. Although, I have to admit, I took a number of pictures on my cell phone also – convenient & less “in your face” than a camera.

Something else disappeared when we switched, especially from film cameras, to digital cameras and eventually cell phones – printing our pictures. And I am embarrassed that I have been guilty of this as well. The exception has been our formal portraits.

I started something several years ago, to capture and store images in a different way. I have files on my computer that I store my children’s images – pictures meaningful to them. I know that they are meaningful because they have shared them on their social media pages. After every year, or sometimes semester, depending on how many images there are, I create books for them. So at least these memories have been stored in one way or another. I also burn disks of the pictures and store them, in case we find need to print more of them later.

Is it a perfect system? I don’t think such perfection exists. But I can tell you that my children really enjoy them! And you can get a LOT of pictures printed in a rather thin book, also saving on space.

I would love to hear about your ways of preserving your snapshots! 🙂