These days most people have either a camera or a very capable smart phone to take pictures. So why would you hire a professional when you could do it yourself?
As someone that likes to research and consider my options before making a decision, I have found several reasons that hiring a professional photographer is more than worth the investment.
High Quality Photos
When I had my first child, I wanted to document the many firsts and special moments we experienced with our sweet baby as a new family of 3. I had an entry level Nikon d3100 (do they still make these?) with a kit lens and thought I knew what I was doing having a good quality dslr in my bag. Well, looking at these photos from years back, I see now that it was not the case. I shot in automatic mode (much like most smartphone cameras) and had too low of shutter speeds causing severe motion blur, a lack of understanding about the importance of light in photography and the impact it would have on my final picture, and was shooting in jpeg format, which left little wiggle room for any corrections I would need to make in post processing.
The phone pictures my husband and I took also had the same result. At the time I thought the pictures looked fine and honestly as a sleep deprived new mom, had little time or energy to look at the images I was capturing. Between the smaller image size of phone pictures and overall underexposure or poor quality, sadly a lot of the pictures are unusable.
Love the moments in these older pictures but the low quality cell phone pictures and blurry-ness is real. Indoor low-light photography, especially on cellphones, is hard!
You want to do it all as a new parent or parent of multiple children but it’s okay and often necessary to enlist help.
As my photography skills have grown over the years after many hours of practice and furthering education, I was even more motivated to take my pictures of my children right after they were born and beyond. And if that is you too, that is wonderful! It is so great to be a historian for your family. But I can say with having 3 children myself, it is much harder to photograph your own children! I have worked with dozens of children and still want an assistant to wrangle my kids haha!
Continue reading Part 2 for more reasons why hire a professional photographer to preserve your family's memories!
