My philosophy goes against the grain of the industry in that I do not charge for prints or for printing an image of your choice. Instead, I give you the opportunity — and encourage everyone I work with — to print your own photographs.
I will guide you on where to print and why, and I will help you set up an account with a professional lab that best serves your needs. Whether you want fine art prints or standard 4×6 photographs for a family album, the labs I recommend deliver the highest quality and maintain professional standards, along with excellent support teams to assist with recommendations or corrections if needed.
There is a deeper reason for this. A photograph is not complete when it exists only as a file. A digital image lives inside a machine — behind a password, on a drive you rarely open, inside a folder you may not remember naming. Hard drives fail. Phones are replaced. File formats change. Accounts expire. Entire family histories have quietly disappeared because a computer crashed or a cloud service was forgotten. We tend to believe digital storage is permanent, but it is actually fragile. It requires electricity, hardware, software, and memory just to be seen.
A print, however, exists on its own. It does not need a device, an update, or a login. It sits on a wall where you pass it every day. It lives in an album that someone opens during a holiday visit. A child grows up seeing those photographs and learns who they were, who their parents were, and what their family life looked like. The photograph becomes part of daily life instead of an occasional search through a screen.
Printed photographs also change how we value the image. When a photograph is one of thousands scrolling past on a phone, it is easy to ignore. When it is printed and placed in a frame, it becomes intentional. You stop and look at it. You notice expression, gesture, and memory. A moment that lasted seconds becomes something you revisit for decades. Prints slow time down.
There is also a historical truth here: nearly every photograph we still have from a century ago survives because it was printed. We know what our great-grandparents looked like because someone made a physical photograph and cared enough to keep it. Digital files have not yet proven they can do the same across generations. A box of prints in an attic has outlasted countless computers.
For me, photography is meant to live in the real world. The purpose of the image is not just to exist, but to be experienced. A framed photograph anchors a home. An album becomes part of family gatherings. Years later, those images are no longer simply pictures; they become memory itself.
So I encourage my clients to print. Not because it is traditional, and not because it is sentimental, but because it is practical and lasting. A hard drive stores data. A print preserves a life.