Everyone has a story to tell. As a counselor I spend a lot of time trying to help people examine their past. My job is to help people. One of the tools that I use is the past. People do the things they do, because of the things they have done. How we remember the past greatly influences our present thoughts and beliefs. I believe that photographs are one of the most overlooked tools for counseling and life in general. People are storytellers by nature. We want people to know where we have been. We want them to know how we feel. Our greatest stories can be written through photographic prints. You know how they say a picture is worth a thousand words right? Well the digital age has given us the ability to capture photos in ways we never could have hoped to do just a few years ago. But something changed. We stopped printing our pictures when we started taking photos with digital cameras. We no longer have boxes or albums full of prints. We have old hard drives full of images on old computers. Our computers have been replaced with our tablets. Our cameras have been replaced by our phones. It's really easy to take pictures, but it's a hassle to print them. So we don't. We have become a culture that has forgotten how to write our stories. We capture the story and unknowingly discard it. We are so busy taking pictures with our phones, that we don't really experience that special or important moment. Then we move on, and never really archive that photo. We might go back and look at it again once or twice in the phone or camera, but something will come along that will keep that memory from being transferred to a print. We are witnessing the story, and then forgetting to write it down. Maybe your software update will go wrong and the images will get erased. Maybe your memory card will go bad, or you'll accidentally erase the photos. Maybe your phone will accidentally go swimming.

Did you know that film is almost no longer being made? Photo printing has become so inexpensive, but we only print a small fraction of what we shoot with our cameras. I believe that printing your pictures is something that can help you write your story.

I admit, I am guilty of not printing enough of my own photos. I did professional photography for several years, and I loved to print my own photos. Eventually it became too much like work to print my own photos. It was also pretty pricey to print my own with the extremely nice ink jet printer I had. Today I can get professional prints made for less than twenty cents apiece. I have made a commitment to my family to print more photos, and I have been doing it. I have to say, that it's really cool to see more and more prints on our walls. It makes me remember the great times that we have been having as a family. Now that we have two children, I am very excited. I want them to see visual reminders of their stories hanging on our walls. I want them to see that we choose as a family to visually write our story through photography.