He Is Turning 11 and I Walk Past His Portrait Every Single Day: A Powerful Reminder to Print Your Photos

My son turns 11 today Eleven. I honestly do not know how that happened.

During COVID, when the world had completely stopped and we were all just home together with nowhere to go and nothing to do, I took his portrait. He was little. He had that look on his face that only kids have, the one that is equal parts curious and completely unbothered by the chaos happening around him. I printed it large and hung it in our home and now we walk past it every single day.

Every. Single. Day. I walk past that photo and I cannot believe how fast time has gone.

He is too smart for his own good now. He loves chess and anime and traveling with his cousins. He is an incredible big brother, even if lately he has been doing his very best impression of an annoying one. He is the kind of kid who would not hurt a fly. And he is turning eleven years old and I am not entirely sure where the last decade went.

I am a photographer. I take pictures for a living. And I am telling you right now that the most important photo in my house is a printed portrait hanging on my wall, not a file sitting in a folder on my phone.

The Photos on Your Phone Are Not Enough

I know you have thousands of photos on your phone. I do too. And I love them. But here is the honest truth about photos that live only on a device: they are invisible. You scroll past them. You forget they exist. You mean to back them up and then you do not. And one day your phone dies or gets lost or the cloud storage runs out and a chapter of your family’s story disappears with it.

A print on your wall cannot be accidentally deleted. Your kids walk past it every morning. Your family sees it when they come to visit. It becomes part of the texture of your home and your life in a way that a digital file simply never will.

I have a few printed photos of my grandmother that I treasure. We did not see each other often and when we did, taking pictures together was honestly the last thing on our minds. We were just happy to be in the same room. But the photos we do have? Those are everything. I would give anything for more of them.

Your Kids Will Not Remember the Day. The Photo Will.

My son does not remember the COVID portrait session. He was too young. But he sees that photo every day and he knows that version of himself existed. He knows what he looked like at that age, in that moment, in that season of our lives together. That photo is doing something for him that his memory cannot.

One day he will be grown. He will have his own home and his own life and maybe his own kids. And he is going to want to know what he looked like when he was little. He is going to want to show someone. And I want to have something to give him that is more than a screenshot.

Every single year on his birthday I forget to take a family picture. Every year. I am a photographer and I still let it slip by. This year I am saying it out loud so I actually do it. This year we are getting the photo.

What Printing Your Photos Actually Looks Like

I know printing can feel overwhelming when you are not sure where to start. So let me make it simple. Every family is different and every home is different, which is why I never prescribe one solution to everyone. But the products my clients consistently love most are large matted albums and framed wall prints.

The large matted album is something you can sit with. You can pull it off the shelf and flip through it on a Sunday morning. You can hand it to your kids and watch their faces. It is tactile and beautiful and it tells a story in a way that a slideshow on your phone never quite does.

And a framed print on your wall? That is the one you walk past every day. The one that stops you for just a second every few weeks and reminds you of exactly who your family was in that moment. That is the one that will still be hanging there when your kids come home for the holidays twenty years from now.

The Tucson Families Who Choose to Print Never Regret It

In all my years photographing families in Tucson and Oro Valley, I have never once had a client tell me they wished they had printed fewer photos. Not once. I have had clients cry when they see their album for the first time. I have had moms text me months later to tell me their kids ask to look at the album on the regular. I have had families come back for another session specifically because the prints from their last one meant so much to them.

The regret always goes the other way. The families who only took digital files and never printed anything. The ones who lost photos in a hard drive crash. The ones who wish they had done a session sooner, before the kids got bigger, before someone got sick, before the season of life changed.

Your future self will thank you for printing. I promise.

Happy Birthday to My Favorite Chess Player

To my son, who is somehow turning eleven: you are one of the best things I have ever done. I hope you know that the giant portrait of you hanging in our home is not just decoration. It is proof. Proof that you were here, that you were loved, that this season of our lives together was worth remembering.

And to every mom reading this who has been meaning to book a session, meaning to print the photos, meaning to do something with the thousands of pictures sitting on your phone: today is a good day to start. Your kids are not getting any younger. Neither are we.

If you are ready to create something worth printing, I would love to be your Tucson family photographer. Reach out and let’s talk about what that looks like for your family. I book about two months in advance and I would love to help you capture this season before it becomes the next one.