Today’s post on photo printing and wall displays is a follow up to last week’s topic of summer travel photography. As a family photographer, I am passionate about capturing moments for my clients + my children. I believe that capturing your family’s moments and telling our stories is important and it matters. It matters a lot! Whether it’s a simple moment or life event, both play an important part of telling your family’s unique story.
Don’t Let Your Jpegs Grow Up to be Jpegs
Documenting our family memories doesn’t have to stop once the beautiful image is a jpeg on your phone/computer and is shared on social media. This is where most of our online generation stops. Our jpegs grow up to be jpegs and never leave our computers. My hope is to encourage readers to print your images and have the gratification of walking by your tangible photos and reliving those memories daily. I cannot tell you how much gratification a tangible, printed product will bring. I have seen first hand how printing physical pictures impacts our children. I have witnessed the joy they get from looking through photo books + gazing at our travel wall.
I recently found my boys on top of their hockey table showing all of their friends our travel wall and sharing stories of their vacations. This is a huge way to establish a strong family foundation and create connection with our children. Today, I am sharing a few of my favorite ways to display the thousands of family photos that fill my hard drive. I hope that you will find a way to incorporate these practices or expand upon them for your own family memories.
Travel Wall
This travel wall is the most fun + easy + affordable wall display that we have. A fellow photographer from the Seattle area gave me this idea last spring. She had a similar wall in her home and I knew I just need to make our own. I used IKEA Dignitet curtain wires, 5.5 X 7.5 card stock and 5X7 prints from my professional printer. My boys helped me choose the images and assemble this wall. I love that the display takes up a large area and is very easy to change out. We now print our favorite images from every vacation as soon as we get home and add them to the travel wall.
Chat Books
I know that many of your area already familiar with the company Chat Books that prints your Instagram account images and sends them to you in these adorable square books. I started printing my Instagram account about a year ago as a personal record of my online gallery. What I didn’t know is how much my boys would love these books. We keep them on the coffee table and they look through them daily. I have even found them in their sheets because they were looking through them before bed. These books are so easy to set up and ship automatically once you have 60 pages filled with photos and captions.
Archival Family Albums
I remember spending hours and hours flipping through family photo albums as a child. I think this is how we relived our memories and cemented them into our childhood brains. Yes they were filled with ugly green shag carpet and awful 70’s clothes but those my favorite treasures from my childhood. I want my boys to have the same experience which is why I have print them an annual photo album each year. The task can seem overwhelming but I encourage you to start small and go from there. Maybe just a book from one family vacation? Nothing is too small to be documented and printed to preserve your family’s story. A few of my favorite printing services are MPIX, Artifact Uprising, and Blurb.
Canvas Gallery Wall Display
Finally we have our most traditional display. Below is a photo of the canvas display in our dining room. I have to admit that I was overwhelmed for a long time on how to print + design this space. I recently purchased software to design gallery walls for my clients. It allows me to take a photo of their actual walls and then create a display with images from a session. This software is amazing and I now have a canvas wall with all of our own beautiful photos. Starting fall 2017 I will be offering a complimentary standard wall display mock up with all Signature Collections.
Thanks again and I hope you have some inspiration to go start your own photo walls + albums.
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