This beautiful display album arrived on the courier yesterday. It's a 10x10 inch flush-mount album (meaning photos are printed right on the rigid pages of the album), covered in a teal linen with silver embossing. These albums are now an option for my awesome portrait clients!

This blog post leads on from last week's blog; Why I am so passionate about printing photos (if you haven't read it yet please do!) Obviously I am a photographer so I'm here to take beautiful portraits of you and create professional products that will endure and be enjoyed for years to come - but this blog post and last week's one actually relates not just to professional portraits, but to the snapshots we take everyday.

So today I'm going to give you a few ideas for how to get the most from your photos. Make it a regular exercise to get the photos from your iPhone or camera printed off. And if you do have photographs lying on a USB from when you had professional photos taken by a photographer go get them printed too!

THE PHOTO BOOK - If you want to get a bit fancier than the old slide-in photo albums, you can design your own printed photo book online these days with relative ease. At the end of each year I collate photos from my phone and Matt's, photos sitting on the computer and sometimes even photos from Facebook. I sit down for an hour or two and set about creating a photo book of all our adventures during the year (that is the time consuming part, however most online designers have pre-made templates to speed up the process). Then within a few weeks my photo book arrives on the courier. These books sit proudly on my bookshelf in the lounge. And just last week I was reminiscing about our trip to America - rather than going to find the photos on my laptop or phone, I went straight to the photo book on the shelf!

Professional photo albums are part of my product range here in the studio and are a popular choice for many clients who want their photographs printed to be enjoyed but not necessarily wanting to put them on the walls of their home.

THE TREASURE BOX - Not into albums or just know you'll never get around to making a photo book? The treasure box idea is a great option for having as a bookshelf or coffee table piece. Your treasure box could be an ornamental wooden box, a simple cardboard box + lid, or something else - but the idea is that you print photos regularly and keep them in the box. You could tie pretty ribbon around the bundles of photos. You could start a treasure box for each child, keeping photos of all their childhood milestones in one place, and then give the treasure box to them on their 21st birthday.

I do a very similar product in studio - prints in a keepsake box. These prints are matted, so they're ready to frame if you wish, otherwise simply to be treasured in their accompanying wooden box for safe-keeping.

PHOTO WALLS - When I was a teen my Mum helped me make a photo display to collage my photos and hang on the wall. It was a piece of board which we covered in patterned fabric, then pinned red ribbon across it diagonally so I could slide prints in behind the ribbon. Today there are even cooler ideas out there (just check out Pinterest!) from collages of frames to pegged prints hung up on string. 

I am extremely excited to have my new printer up and running in the studio and I plan to try out doing square prints for collage walls - like having a real-life Instagram feed on your wall!

Hopefully these ideas might inspire you to go out and get those photos off your devices and into prints! If you have any questions whatsoever about printing, photobooks or anything photographic please get in touch - I would love to help! x

And when I say photos I don't just mean professional photos you get done with a photographer. I mean photos in general. The holiday snaps, your daughter's first birthday photos, day-to-day photos of the kids playing, travel photos. All these photos hold many precious memories, yet we're not printing them like we used to!

We are living in a generation where technology is moving faster than the speed of light, where everything seems to be digital driven and as a result I truly believe we will be one of the most photographed generations (the front-facing camera for selfies anyone?!), yet our grandparents will have more enduring photographic prints than us. Digital storage decays - look at the death of the floppy disk and the CD-ROM - most laptops don't even have a disc drive anymore! I can see the same thing happening with USBs one day. Storing our photos on digital devices or even in the "cloud" is not infallible. 

I remember as a child having a cheap film camera, the kind that you wind the film on after every photo you take. I remember Dad taking photos on his Pentax camera. After we finished the roll of film, off to the photo lab we'd go & come home with the 6x4 inch prints. I remember putting these prints into photo albums, sliding each one into it's new home. I still have all my photo albums - photos I took of my pets, of friends, of places I went exploring, of Mum & Dad. 

But how many of us can say that we still do this? That we still print our photos off regularly and treasure them? Most of us just refer back to the photo on our iPhone or computer when we want to look at them - which is wonderful for it's convenience, but our digital devices are not enduring. How many of us have lost hundreds of precious photos because of phones dying, being lost, because of software updates gone wrong? We have lost the precious ritual of printing our memories and having them to hold forevermore.

So then what photographic legacy are we leaving for our kids? One of my most precious possessions is my Dad's photo album. It's a story book, a lifetime of memories and moments encapsulated in a beautiful brown leather album. But if our generation is just storing everything digitally, what will our children have of us when we're gone? Their computers probably won't have USB ports and the cloud storage companies of our time might have disappeared by then. 

And lastly, the reason I still choose to print our everyday photos into photobooks and albums each year...because there is a magic in the art of it. No iPad with Retina display, no 4K ultra HD screen will ever replace the magic of holding an album of photos in your hands. Flicking through the pages of it as you sit with your children. Getting it off the bookshelf, dusting it off and smiling as you remember that time you spent all weekend at the beach with the family. There is a magic about printed photographs and I hope that our generation remembers before it is too late.

Next week I am going to blog about ways you can get the most from your photographs - ideas for printing and enjoying your images.xx