Folks who’ve never paid for professional photography sometimes aren’t quite sure where to begin or how much they should pay. Sometimes they’ll go straight to the cheapest photographer they find, but when the photos come in, they’re immensely disappointed. We’ve been working for years in the Broad Run Farms, VA and Leesburg, VA areas and surrounding communities and have a lot of experience. We can tell you that we’re not surprised cheap “professional” photos usually result in a poor final product. And, we aren’t saying this out of self interest or self promotion; we want our clients to be extremely happy with their portrait session and with the final products they purchase, whether it’s a large piece of wall art or an album or prints. So how much should you invest in family portraits?

As with many other services, you get what you pay for. With a professional photographer, you will be paying for their skill set, their years of training, specialized equipment and technology, and, lastly, you’re paying for experience (that alone can be worth a lot!)

There are many instances in life when you can get a good thing without necessarily having to pay a lot. Sometimes a $10 bottle of wine is just as good as a $20 bottle. But, sometimes it isn’t! Photography is usually the latter: Paying less simply because you can could mean disappointment and wasted time and money.

An article last year on the Angie’s List blog, provided tips on how to select a photographer and the role pricing can play. “Expertise is the main factor that dictates the price a professional photographer charges. With more experience, a professional photographer typically charges more,” according to the article.
 

 
Can you find a photographer with little experience who takes great pictures? Yes, you can. However, experience can make an enormous difference outside of technical knowledge – like how to handle and direct children during a portrait session, where and how to stage a session and how to handle multiple, sometimes uncooperative, clients (we all know teens don’t love being in front of any camera but their own!), and so on. Years of experience, technical expertise, and experience are what you get and pay for when you hire a highly-skilled, reputable photographer like Ever After!

So to answer the initial question of “How much should you invest in your family portraits?”: It does depend on your budget, of course, as well as your expectations for the final product. Are you content with a few prints that you will stick in a drawer and very rarely look at? Or do you want a beautiful family portrait finished and ready to hang, one that will be treasured for generations to come?

We’re happy to discuss your questions, your budget, and what we have to offer with our professional photography! Reach out to us if you live anywhere in the Northern Virginia area, especially Broad Run Farms, VA and Leesburg, VA.
 

Family Photographer, Professional Photography

Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, a mother-daughter professional photography team located near Broad Run Farms, VA and 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

What makes you happy in life? Your loved ones? Your experiences? Your house or your cars? Your Rolex? You’ve probably at some point considered the role of that which is tangible versus intangible in your life. We bet you’ve probably not considered photography as being either one! Both, however, lie at the essence of what defines professional photography – or any photography, for that matter. It is a somewhat philosophical question but to photographers, it is one that matters. Tangible and intangible lie at the essence of portrait photography.

Some of the most profound things in our lives are also the most intangible – like love, respect, affection, grief, and joy. And yet, intangibles often depend on tangibles to exist or to be conveyed – like our children, our spouses or partners, our pets, even our careers or a beautiful garden. To feel those intangible emotions we need a tangible, don’t we? So, back to the question: Is photography a tangible or an intangible part of our lives?

A portrait itself is tangible. You can see it. You can touch it. You order it to be framed or otherwise finished so you can display it. The reasons for wanting or ordering a portrait are likely driven by the intangible: Love, honor, memory, respect, etc. Thus, a portrait is tangible, but it’s completely driven by the intangible.

A portrait, very importantly, should also evoke the intangible. When you look at your parents’ wedding portrait from 40 years ago, what do you feel? Doesn’t joy well up in you to see their happiness? Don’t those emotions sometimes bring up tears?

To professional photographers like us, that link between the tangible and intangible aspects of portrait photography matters tremendously. It’s an honor for us to create a portrait as the tangible evidence of our clients’ love for their families. This is why we put so much thought and time into our work. Creating a careless portrait would be unimaginable to us because we know that when when someone looks at their children’s portraits now and years from now, they will feel a flood of emotions.

So when a client or potential client asks us if they should order portraits for display or settle for a DVD of their pictures, without hesitation we always recommend finished portraits for display. The reason for this, again, goes back to that link between tangible and intangible.

You decided to do professional portraits because you deeply love your family. Why would you not display your portraits? Why put a DVD of them into a drawer where they won’t make you smile, where they won’t remind you of your family’s love, and where they will become something purely intangible to you?

As family photographers to the Broad Run Farms, VA and surrounding areas of Northern Virginia, we always say that portrait photography is one of the most enjoyable gifts you can give yourself and your family as a tangible way of capturing your lives today in this moment, for you to enjoy now and for future generations to cherish.
 

Family Photographer, Professional Photography

Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, a mother-daughter professional photography team located near Broad Run Farms, 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

The fun-loving and playful Schnelzer Family, with two active little boys, spend a lot of time outside enjoying the beautiful Northern Virginia weather. Between sports, bike rides, and playtime typical of a family with active little boys, the family found time to prioritize family pictures. They found what they wanted in Ever After Portraits, photographers who specialize in family photos in their own private portrait park near Leesburg, VA.

This handsome, busy family loves to take nature walks and enjoys a lot of outdoor activities. Amy wanted their family pictures to be taken outside in our portrait park, and they wanted the photos to represent them as the family truly is: relaxed, casual, and natural!

Our wooden bridge proved to be just a wonderful spot for their family pictures. Sitting casually together, their family’s love and bond shines from their portrait. The rich outdoor autumn colors create a perfect backdrop for their light-colored outfits. The young family seems to radiate light from the center of the photo!
 

 
Bryce and Evan had fun climbing around our old truck, and then lounging on one of our couches. Aren’t they handsome?!
 

 
Amy and Jesse knew just where they wanted to display their new family pictures. Amy wanted to update the current centerpiece of the family’s wall of portraits, an older family portrait. For those clients who are unsure where to display their family photos, we can help. Using our specialty software program, we can show them beforehand how portraits will look on any given wall in your home. All a client has to do is send us a picture of the wall. We can upload it into our special software, and voila! You can see what your portrait would like on your wall!

We think we captured this happy family as they truly are and can imagine their portrait hanging in the center of their wall of family photos. There is nothing better to display in your home than your loving family pictures.

As family portrait photographers, Ever After loves working with families from across the Leesburg, VA and Northern Virginia areas to depict their families through beautiful portraits.
 

Family Photographers, Family Pictures

Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, a mother-daughter portrait 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

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