These days, having pictures to look at and cheer me up seems more important than ever! I have a picture of my parents on a shelf right by my desk that I get to look at every day. It’s my favorite picture of them and even more special since my father passed way in 2011. Sometimes I ask my clients, “Can I get one with just the two of you?” (i.e. without the kids). Some people resist it, but here’s why I think it’s important: How many of us have pictures of our own parents together? I have maybe two or three, but it’s never felt like enough. We all have the standard picture, often taken at a wedding, where everyone is standing stock-still and looking at the camera. I’m not talking about those kinds of photos…I’m talking about ones where you can really see the reason your parents got married, right there in the photograph. I have to be honest, it’s rare that people are willing to open their hearts up that far in a session with a photographer that they just met fifteen minutes ago. I can’t really blame them. Sometimes I get to see it on the first session, sometimes the third, but there is this magic moment when the people I’m working with open up to me and I get to peer inside that little window which reveals their hearts and love and it becomes captured forever in images. For them. For their children. For their children’s children. So they all can know the love that they came from and that it will always be there for them to look back on.