Thirty favorite things about documenting our family

I love having my camera with me and documenting our life. I have been toting it with me pretty religiously for family photos since I completed my first project 365 in 2017. Fun fact: I even carried it around at my wedding reception. Pictures are just so important, and I love photographing the people who are important to me.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past year, it’s to take the dang picture. Since November 2019, we have lost my Grandpa, my cousin, Dalton, and Justin’s sister, Kylie. And while I do have pictures of them all, I just keep wishing I’d taken one more.

Thirty favorite things about documenting our family

1. The best camera is the one you have with you. Sometimes I take a quick phone photo, but I love when I have my DSLR with me.
2. Making our yearly family albums and ordering them from Blurb books. 
3. Having yearly albums that keep the whole year printed in one place.
4. Printing our pictures, and not just the sessions we have another professional take, but our everyday photos too! 
5. Having those moments scattered around the house.
6. It is nice to have a system in place for phone photos and camera photos so that nothing is living and dying on a hard drive.
7. Using Chatbooks for phone photos. 
8. Getting five prints with our Chatbooks is like a little bonus.
9. Printing lay flat albums of the big moments – engagement, wedding, birth, newborn, etc. 
10. Displaying those albums and the yearbooks on our bookshelf for visitors to see. 
11. I love seeing how much my family has grown and changed since I started toting my camera around all the time.
12. Plus seeing how much my work has grown from toting my camera around all the time. 
13. It makes me so happy to share our photos with our family. 
14. Capturing our extended family is always important too! 
15. Feeling like the historian of the family – the one constantly documenting all of our gatherings, big and small. 
16. Having photos from those gatherings to remember the ones we’ve lost. 
17. The feeling of freezing time and the memories that come back when looking at old photos. 
18. How easy digital photography has made it for me to document my family. Film photography and printing photos is amazing, but having my photos right at my fingertips is a luxury my parents didn’t have. 
19. With everything that was 2020, sharing photos on Instagram, Facebook and in group chats has been the main way most of the extended family has watched Wynn grow. 
20. Using a tripod to get in the photos with Justin and Wynn is always fun. A little stressful, but mostly fun. 
21. Wynn’s monthly posts to help keep all those memories preserved. 
22. The project 365 posts from 2017 and 2018 that I completed and shared. 
23. Designing our albums and selecting which photos to print always takes forever because I get so caught up reminiscing. 
24. Training my brain to think creatively for album layout so that the design is pretty. 
25. This also helps during sessions and on wedding days so that I am always thinking about clients blogs and albums. 
26. Capturing all the videos on Wynn on my phone. 
27. Watching the videos of Wynn with Wynn while he smiles and laughs. And sometimes dancing if there is music. 
28. Looking forward to flipping through the albums with Wynn and future children as they grow up. 
29. The joy of knowing the photos will help me remember so many great stories to tell them. 
30. Documenting our life to leave our mark, and say, “Hey, we were here.”

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I am so excited you found me! Just so you to know your email is going to make my day, and I’ll probably do a little happy dance when it hits my inbox. I love email because it helps me keep all our important conversations in one place versus spreading the conversation out over email, text, Instagram DMs, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, etc. You can expect to hear from me within 24 hours. You can contact me here, or just shoot me an email at kelsey@kelseyalumbaugh.com