(Pictured is our museum case in stone.)
Your immediate answer may be, “well, both!” Ultimately – yes. Sure. But recently I had a revelation on this that I want to dive a little more into and tell you about.
You may have read that I have a few plans in place to keep our personal images organized and preserved. You can read that post here. I am a little bit of a geek about it.
I print iPhone photos, family photos I take on my professional cameras and every single image from our personal family sessions with other photographers. Needless to say, we have a few photos around our house.
As I was recently moving a large quantity of photos from a keepsake box to an insert photo album, I realized just how many photos I have of each family session we have ever done with other photographers. These are excellent photos. Special photos. But I realized – I don’t actually need or even want (gasp!) all of these photos from each session.
I realized I loved with a fierce love about 20 of them – not all 90 of them. Those 20? I select to go into a family album. I print them on archival paper and put them in our fire box (you know, the one I grab in case of a fire.) These 20 are the ones I remember when I think of that session or season of our life. I don’t need all 90 where we aren’t all looking in some – or our emotions are drained from our faces.
I have said this is a value of mine in my business. Print. Print. Print. But I realized just how important this concept is first hand and it begins with me as the artist. Cull. Cull. Cull.
My clients don’t actually want 90 images. They may tell me they do. But they don’t. I would bet they don’t even have 90 images in frames around the house. Who does?? They need a limited number of quality portraits. And these images? They don’t stay on a screen. They are printed, preserved and cherished.
So, if the question is quality or quantity – the answer is quality. Every time. Don’t let the number fool you.
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