If you’ve visited my home in the past 5 months, you’ve seen this canvas hanging on our wall! I may have shared with you who’s in the picture and where we were when we took it, but there’s so much more to this priceless photography of my family than that. Before I bought this canvas, I had this conversation with my mom…

Me: “If there was an emergency and we needed to evacuate our house, would you grab any photos or keepsakes or anything?”
My mom: “No, I’d take my iPad! All the photos I’d want are saved on there.”
Me: “Really? What about the older ones of you as a kid growing up or your family members that aren’t alive?”
My mom: “I have them scanned online. They’re all here.”
Me: “Oh. Okay.”

To say my heart was broken would be an understatement! I totally understand her logic. If she has everything as a digital copy scanned online, it’s safe and she doesn’t have to worry about things printed, right? Very logical…but just a few weeks later, this canvas came in the mail to our door. As I opened it and we hung it up together, we couldn’t stop staring at it. With big giddy smiles on our faces, we were both so in awe at this beautiful and huge picture of us on our living room wall.

I asked my mom the question I’d asked her before, and she said, “I would absolutely grab this canvas we ever needed to leave in an emergency.” Gosh, that made me so happy, and I would catch her just standing and staring at it almost every day for at least a week after we hung it up.

This isn’t just a picture of my family. This is a frozen memory of our mini vacation to Savannah last summer during a hard time when we were just days away from putting our dog down. We had planned and hoped to take him with us on our trip, but his sickness made it impossible for him to ride in the car for more than a few miles without panicking. So, this picture is just the three of us, but with Pepsi on our minds.

This picture looks like it was taken on the steps outside of a house in Brooklyn, which is perfect because that’s where my mom grew up and it’s a place in this big world that will always represent our family. We found these steps near Forsyth Park on the morning we were leaving Savannah and we knew it would be perfect for a photograph. I set up the tripod and the self-timer and after many tries, this picture was captured.

I love having this photograph in our home because it’s the most valuable piece of art hanging on our walls. I love friends, family, and clients seeing it when they come over to visit because I can explain to them how much it means to us. This photograph will have more of an impact than any that are kept saved on a computer, a hard drive, a cell phone, a tablet, or on social media because it’s so pricelessly infused into our lives as we get to look at it nice and big every single day.

In all the years I’ve been taking pictures, I’ve never seen my own work enlarged this big. I’ve been so used to handheld digital versions or smaller prints of my pictures. But with this photograph so big and beautiful, I can’t imagine having important memories like this stay as .jpgs or 4×6 prints forever!

I’m so excited to serve my clients with tangible products of their photographs so that they can experience these exact same feelings every time they see, hold, and display their memories.