Hiring a professional photographer for family portraits might seem like something you can easily put off. You might be thinking of updating that big-screen TV the size of a Volkswagen to a new flat-screen panel. Maybe you’re thinking you’ll just buy a new iPhone instead of order pictures of your children. After all, you do have some family snapshots and plenty of other shots of your children. Why would you want to put off buying that snazzy flat-screen for professional photos?!

Uh, let us count the ways…

Documenting

A professional photographer loves to document. Stand in front of them and they will document you. It’s just what we do! It’s a passion every photographer has. Remember, very few photographers have become millionaires off their photography! We do it because we love what we do. With children’s photography, especially, professional photographers truly can make a difference. We have worked for years photographing little ones. There’s no buyer’s remorse with professionally crafted portrait art! Document your lives, your children’s lives, while you can. You won’t ever regret having a photo of your loved ones.
 

Creativity

A professional won’t waste your time. We know the best composition for any shot. We know what angles will work best with any given photo session. We have worked with many a body shape, subject, and cranky models (meaning, hungry children). We know how to pose everyone just right! We know how to keep the photo session moving with everyone walking away happy! We know how to create your ideal portrait. We don’t take quick snapshots. Remember, we document! A professional photographer will give you what snapshots or electronics simply cannot: Lasting memories on quality, archival materials rated to last 150 years!

Post Production

We’ve been extensively trained on just the right finishes, retouching, and editing so that you end up with perfect portraits. We have the patience for post-production to get all the photos looking great. We are well versed in using professional software. We also make multiple back-ups to all our files. We are perfectionists who believe we are creating something very important and precious for our clients!

Hiring a professional photographer allows you to capture your moments, your family, your children. At Ever After, we specialize in memories through our family and children’s photography across the Northern Virginia and Leesburg, VA area. We help you document and capture your memories now while you can – to have and to enjoy for decades and decades.

Will a flat-screen TV do that for you?

Family Photographer, Children Photography

Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, mother-daughter family photographers located near Leesburg, VA in Northern Virginia. We specialize in timeless and emotive fine art family portraits.
 
Family means everything and capturing those precious moments to preserve forever will mean family heirlooms for you to share for years to come.
 
Best,
 
Mindy & Joriana – Contact Us!
 
Professional Photographer

Tip #4 in our series “How to Understand & Work with Your Photographer” is: Don’t Ever Crop Out a Watermark! Photographers, us and every photographer in the Leesburg, VA area included, will tell you to never ever crop out a watermark. And, we really mean never! To cut or edit out a watermark is infringing into some shady legal areas and, certainly, behaving unethically. Not to mention the disrespect you are showing the photographer!

Photographers don’t just pick up a camera, hang out their shingle, and open a studio for portraits. Just like the money spent on a college education, we have spent countless hours and dollars investing in our careers and education. We train and work exceptionally hard to develop our own brands and styles. We have pursued our dreams just like anyone else. And, like any artist, we sign our final product proud of what we’ve just created or produced. It is a disservice and disrespect to cut out our watermark for your personal purposes. If you cut out a watermark for personal financial gain, then you’ve just broken the law.

Sometimes someone wants to crop out a watermark to use the photo for their Christmas or holiday cards. We say leave it in! Wouldn’t you want your friends to see that you’ve had these gorgeous family portraits done for your family? Again, if you want to cut out a photographer’s watermark, we would say: Don’t do it. Just like writers want credit for their writing, and painters for their art, so do photographers.

We have been fortunate at Ever After to have nothing but extremely respectful and kind clients. We know, however, that other photographers haven’t been so fortunate. When in doubt, just ask! An informed decision is a better decision. As photographers, we are happy to answer any questions to you have whether you are a client or just live in the Leesburg, VA area. Just contact us!

Other tips in this series:
Tip #1, Understanding the Process
Tip #2, Don’t ask for more photos than the ones we present to you
Tip #3, Don’t Expect Free Photography
 

Family Photographers, Portraits

Years and generations from now, long after we are gone, who will tell your family’s story? Will there be a memoir or a scrapbook to say how you loved and lived, to show pictures of what your generation looked like? Will you have beautiful, fine art portraits to speak for you and represent to the next generation how you lived? As a photographer, we believe in the power of a portrait. Our clients across the Leesburg, VA area would probably agree with us about the power of a beautifully crafted image to tell a story – their story.

Our clients rely on our fine art portraits to capture their family’s images as a moment in time as much as they entrust portraits to recount their story many, many years from now to those generations not born yet. Fine art portraits taken by a professional photographer are a legacy our clients create today for tomorrow.

Oral and Visual History

Oral history remains as significant as ever in human history. It is a powerful medium for preserving a family’s history and culture. Stories are handed down through the generations of a family, creating a vital oral history of their ancestors, their roots.

However, we also have become an increasingly visual society thanks in significant part to the advancement of technology. Photography is easier, more accessible, and better than ever, both for the novice and the professional studio photographer.

Digital cameras and smartphones have changed how the general public takes pictures and documents their lives. Photography has also taken on a critical role in how families record their history for generations to come. Now more than ever, you can use photography to create a visual history to pass on in addition to oral history.

Snapshot vs. Portraits by a Professional Photographer

A snapshot isn’t the same as a professional portrait taken by a portrait photographer who is skilled and trained in the art of photography. Hiring a professional produces pictures that transcend ordinary snapshots and that are worthy of display as artwork. These are images that tell and preserve your story beautifully and eloquently well into the future.

When done exceptionally well, they become family heirlooms to be handed down through the generations. For example, think to any portraits you own of your grandparents or great-grandparents. How much do you treasure those images? Aren’t they considered priceless in your family and, thus, worthy of being considered family heirlooms?

Museum Quality Portraits

It wasn’t so long ago that museum and archival-quality papers were only available to, well, museums, archives, and other professionals in related industries. Today’s professional photographers, however, are able to use archival-quality photographic papers either on their own or through professional photography labs to create photographic art to last generations.

Unlike portraits from our great-grandparents’ era, professional portraits today are printed on paper you can trust to last for 100+ years without fading or damage. In the early days of printed photography, that luxury didn’t exist.

Display Your Family Portraits in Your Home

Storing portraits on a hard drive or disk seems practical to many people today. But to the professional photographer, fine art images stored solely on a CD or a USB seems unimaginable! It’s akin to wasting something personally valuable by stashing it away where it could be lost to time.

Why hide your story in a drawer where you won’t be able to enjoy it?!

Here are some points to consider:

• Displaying your professional portraits in your home allows you to enjoy them and reminds you of your family story. There’s more, though.
• Seeing your portraits every day helps create lasting memories – and keeps others in your thoughts.
• As we get older, we tend to forget things long past in our life’s story. The more you look at a picture, the more it’s committed to memory.
• So, those gorgeous portraits you display and walk past each day? The day will come when they are stored in your memory, and looking at them will evoke memories from that time in your life.
• How often have you looked at an old picture and remembered, not just the moment captured in the photo, but that day or the days around the photo?
• Have you ever seen an elderly person look at an old picture and recount the story or memory surrounding the photograph? A photograph can help your memory pull up other images long tucked away into the recesses of your mind. The tangible can help recall the intangible.

(By the way, there is some evidence to indicate that the more you focus on taking pictures during an activity or event, the less likely you are to remember that activity! Get a photographer for those special events!)
 

Today, Tomorrow and Decades From Now

Portraits in your home can be significant – both for today, for tomorrow, and for decades from now. Can a snapshot have the same effect? Yes, they can. But can a snapshot be enjoyed 50 years from now with the same quality? It’s unlikely.

A professional, fine art portrait, however, without a doubt can be enjoyed 50 or even 150 years from now. And, for anyone who saw it on a regular basis, that portrait will evoke precious memories.

As a family photographer in the Leesburg, VA area, we relish our role in helping our clients capture memories through photographic art.
 

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Family Photographer, Studio Photographer

Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, a mother-daughter photography team located in Northern Virginia and serving the surrounding area including Leesburg, VA. We specialize in timeless and emotive fine art family portraits.

Family means everything and capturing those precious moments to preserve forever will mean family heirlooms for you to share for years to come.

Best,

Mindy & Joriana – Contact Us!

Professional Photographer

Tip #3 in our series “How to Understand & Work with your Photographer” is: Don’t Expect Free Photography. From Leesburg, VA to Seattle, WA, photographers would say: Please don’t ask for or expect free photography. If it’s not offered, it’s probably not very considerate to ask. Dozens of hours can go into one client from the moment they hire a photographer through to post-production time. Asking for free stuff is asking a lot of a small business owner. Our livelihoods depend on our ability to produce quality work and be paid for it.

It’s not just giving away a digital picture. When a portrait photography studio puts a photo out there attached to their name, it represents them as an artist and as a brand. They aren’t served well by sending out a quick shot that has not been properly edited. Any pictures we send out to clients, paid or otherwise, would need to be properly edited.

If you are asking on behalf of a nonprofit, some photographers might be able to make time to help, but that really depends on their schedule, the nonprofit’s event date, and any number of things. Everyone wants to support a nonprofit, but it isn’t always possible. Some photographers are able to provide free services for a nonprofit event, while others will do it for a very small fee. Other photographers simply can’t afford to give up a Saturday night wedding to shoot a charity event regardless of how much they love that charity. It really all depends.

Again, going back to our initial analogy of the mechanic and the contractor, you wouldn’t ask them for free services or free work would you? It’s no different for photographers. While photographers chose their careers for a love of photography and working with people, most still have to pay their bills like everyone else. Asking for free photos or photography can put everyone in an uncomfortable situation.

We’ve built some great relationships and friendships throughout the Leesburg, VA area. All good photographers should build close relationships with their clients, and we’re proud of ours. We hope that our clients believe in our work and continue to choose us as their family photographer.

Other tips in this series:
Tip #1, Understanding the Process
Tip #2, Don’t ask for more photos than the ones we present to you

Family Photographers, Portrait Photography Studio

Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, a mother-daughter family photography team located near Leesburg, VA in Northern Virginia. We specialize in timeless and emotive fine art family portraits.
 
Family means everything and capturing those precious moments to preserve forever will mean family heirlooms for you to share for years to come.
 
Best,
 
Mindy & Joriana – Contact Us!
 
Professional Photographer