Sometimes tomorrow is too late...

My Grandmother and Grandfather on their 50th

Wedding Anniversary ca. 1992.

My Mom and I sat to down this weekend to plan our family portrait session.  Mom and Dad will celebrate their 50th Anniversary in couple of weeks and what better time to get together and do a family portrait?  She then started talking about what portraits mean to her.  Our conversation became so profound that I asked if she could write about it so I could publish it in my blog.

In her own words:

"As I get older, it is becoming more and more clear to me that good, professional photos of parents and grandparents should be taken before it’s too late. Too many times, senior citizens slip away and the remaining family members are left with a lot of memories, but really no decent photos (other than informal snapshots) of their loved one. If your parents (or grandparents) are getting up in years and haven’t had photos taken for years, give them the gift of a photo session…it will end up being an amazing gift for both of you at some point down the road.

My father died seven years ago. I looked and looked for a really good photo of him to have enlarged to give to Mom because she was missing him terribly. In all the snapshots we had, the image was really too small to have enlarged to make a meaningful picture or we were unable to find the negatives. I finally remembered a photo you had taken on their 50^th wedding anniversary (one of the first official photo sessions you had ever done) and you enlarged it for us and we gifted it to Mom. It means so much to her and it’s the best photo I have of him, too. You really caught his essence!

My in-laws only had professional photographs taken at weddings…so when my father-in-law died, we had a good, but old, photo of him taken at our wedding and a photo taken at my brother-in-law’s wedding…but it was a full length photo and the image was small, so again we ended up without any really good pictures of him when he passed. Actually we have very few snapshots, because he was usually behind the camera…not in front of it.

I think of my grandmother, who was a very special, special person in my life. I wish you could have photographed her before she died. She had a quality that was never photographed. When she saw a camera come out, she assumed her ‘photo pose’ and the camera captured a white haired, stern faced lady. That was NOT her essence…she was an amazing person with an almost impish sense of humor. I think you could have brought that out in her and caught it…and I’d love to be able to see that in a picture of her now...as well as share it with my grandchildren who never had the opportunity to know her.

Too often we think only about our immediate family when we’re having photos taken…remember your parents and grandparents and catch their image now, while you can."