Every week night around 7 or 8 Sandi and I walk or jog around the Atco Lions football field to get in an hour of cardio after the gym. Now that the summer is winding down, football season is around the corner and all the little Michael Vicks and Peyton Mannings of the future are starting their summer workouts and training for the upcoming season. Rather than staring at the display on the back of a treadmill at the gym, it’s much more enjoyable to be out in the fresh air witnessing all the little bobble heads running around reminding me of what I used to look like at that age playing midget football. Earlier this week, all the little cheerleaders joined in and started their practices as well, which reminded me of a chaotic game of Simon Says…with a lot of yelling. As we were jogging by Coach Simon giving the girls their next cheer to try, Sandi noticed something that stood out, all the girls each had their own water bottle and next to each waterbottle…a smart phone. Since our evening cardio sessions have turned into more of business meetings at a light jog, consisting of us tossing around new ideas or planning out our schedule, our conversation that night went from a new business card design to…WOW, it is amazing how times have changed!

It really is amazing how much we have technically grown over just the past decade. The economy may be in the gutter right now, and the unemployment rate seems to not be getting any better, yet it is realistically hard to find someone that doesn’t have a cell phone on them. Its only been about 10 years or so but the idea of having only one home telephone for an entire family or not having access to a phone while driving has went out the window with the digital age that we live in. Remember the days of getting kicked off the internet when the phone would ring, hearing the phone dial out and make that horrible screeching noise of the modem connecting to the internet, or how about just the simple idea that there was a time during the day when you were cut off from the rest of the world and couldn’t be contacted by a phone call, text, or email…it realistically wasn’t all that long ago. I can still remember my first cell phone, that sat in the glove box of my jeep for emergencies. I can still remember receiving my first text message and thinking how cool is that. I also remember my first digital camera, a 3.2 megapixel Canon Powershot…our smartphones put that to shame now.

I also find it funny that Sandi and I never got engagement pics done, it wasn’t something very popular back then. We didn’t even have an engagement party, which I wish we could just have now since we never did…that would be nice. We also got married before everything in photography went digital, so we had no online gallery to view our wedding pictures, and it wasn’t until recently that it dawned on both of us that we had no professional digital images from our wedding at all. While we are shooting engagement sessions left and right, and finalizing wedding packages to offer, its crazy that even though we got married only 7 years ago, so many things are different in wedding photography due to everything being digital now.

We pulled out our box of wedding proofs last week, a box of about 4-500 4x6 photos, and picked out a handful that we wanted digital copies of and instead of scanning them I simply took a picture of them with my D800. They definitely aren’t as crisp and clean as the originals, but good enough for now, maybe I’ll do them again later and add some more to the collection. It had been a while since we had even looked at any of our wedding pictures, but it definitely was a good thing that we did because it took us down Memory Lane and reminded us just how awesome of a wedding it really was and everything that happened throughout that day 7 years ago. It also reminded us of the importance of having these memories, saved in these photographs...or images, and how passionate we both are of being able to capture these moments now for others with our photography.

I know there are a lot of people that haven’t seen these, some of you that got to experience this day with us, and those of you who might not have seen them in as long as we have…so here they are. For those of you who dont know, Sandi and I got married on June 4, 2005 in the Poconos, it was a weekend wedding where the entire bridal party and family stayed all weekend with us in log cabins on a lake. Its only a handful but I plan on adding more to the gallery in the future. All these photographs were taken by Images Photography Studio out of Williamstown, NJ.