Why You Should Print Your Wedding Photos
Hiring a professional wedding photographer is an investment, designed to document the memories of your wedding day for you to look back on throughout your marriage. When you have a wedding photographer, you are not only getting someone who can take a fantastic photo and help calm the nerves throughout the day, you get an expert in printing and preserving those moments that have been captured for years to come. Here are a few reasons why you should print your wedding photos once you have received the digital copies of them.
Preserve the memories of the special day
Your wedding day is one of the biggest days in a couples life together, surrounded by your nearest and dearest, in a way that is rare in todays ever expanding digital world. The photos taken on the day will be an everlasting document of everyone being together, celebrating your love for each other. By printing these memories and making a permanent record, they can be passed onto your family and friends for years to come. Your children will thank you for having a physical record of you at your happiest that they can hold onto as they grow up. Your parents and grandparents can proudly display your wedding day on their mantelpiece - printed photographs make excellent presents and can be a beautiful way to thank people for helping you get to where you are as a couple.
Digital is not perfect
Digital photos are brilliant, they provide a fast method of transfer and allow for significantly more wedding photos to be provided to you than previous mediums. However, there can be a few issues with digital files. For example, every time that a JPEG is saved or shared, the file is compressed, slightly reducing its quality. If you upload your favourite wedding photos to social media such as Facebook or Instagram, they are done so at a massively reduced quality, potentially changing the image from the one produced by the wedding photographer. There is also a question of storage of your digital photos. How do you keep them safe? My wedding packages all come with an online gallery and a USB stick with your wedding photos on. This will only work as long as USBs are still a recognised as a storage medium (anyone remember floppy disks?) and as long as the online gallery is available - usually 12 months.
Printing your photos gives you a physical and ultimately, a safe way to protect your favourite wedding photographs. There are ways to protect and preserve your prints, such as keeping them out of direct sunlight, but they will never be superseded by the next development in computer technology. Printed photographs can be displayed in a multitude of different ways. Albums can be cherished and looked at for years, I know my children love looking back through our wedding album, seeing who they can spot and following the events of the day. Wall art sized prints look stunning when properly framed and can be hung in pride of place in your home.
You actually look at them
Ask yourself a question, how many photos do you see in a day? With the rise of Instagram and Facebook, we are constantly bombarded with photographs and images through our screens every day.
A follow up, how many of those photos do you take the time to actually look at? Thousands of images can pass under our scrolling thumb with little impact to our day. You may stop occasionally to look deeper into a picture that has caught your eye, but the reality is, you skip past and gloss over most of the digital images presented to you.
It is much harder to simply skip over a printed photo. There is something about having the ability to hold a moment in your hand, or see it on the wall that has a power to make you stop and look for a moment. You find yourself looking into the picture and feeling what was going on at the moment it was taken, rather than hitting the like button and moving on with your day!
So there are a few reasons why you should print your wedding photos. I offer a printing service with every gallery that is delivered, using gallery standard papers and printers to ensure your wedding photo becomes art, just like it should be!