Professional family beach portraits on Florida’s Emerald Coast

Lee Iacocca once said, “The only rock I know that stays steady, the only institution I know that works, is the family.” Such an enduring rock deserves enduring photos of it.

Family portraits help maintain a family’s legacy despite the ravages of time. Many people’s experiences of distant or older family members are through pictures. Without them, there would be a blank slide in one’s mind whenever reminiscing about a relative! Every family is a story. Professional pictures help to tell that story. It cancels out any physical or emotional separation. Because of this, I would argue that every family event, especially a vacation, should be professionally documented!

Are you planning a trip to Florida’s Emerald Coast, that beautiful stretch of beach between Panama City Beach and Pensacola Beach? Whether you are coming to Destin for a relaxing vacation, to Navarre Beach for a wedding or Rosemary Beach for a family reunion, why not memorialize your time spent on our sparkling, sugar white sand by having a professional family portrait taken?

Sure, you can ask the nice woman walking down the beach to snap a shot with your phone or your point and shoot camera, but will it be good enough to blow up and hang over your mantle? While it is always nice to embrace spontaneity and have a Good Samaritan snap your photo with an iPhone or inexpensive camera, the results are usually less than stellar. This, however, is to be expected. Although such on-the-fly photos are necessary, as it is impossible to always have a professional photographer following you around (Boy, wouldn’t that be nice? Your own personal noninvasive paparazzi!), they are never of the greatest quality and are poor reflections of an otherwise planned-out trip. Make sure all your bases are covered. I guarantee you will not regret it!

If everything else is planned-out so well, you might as well plan a photo-shoot. Well, on this trip, make it easy on yourself and know you will have great photos of the family by hiring a professional who has the training, equipment and experience to capture the happy time you spent at the beach in a beautiful photograph. After all, these photos are works of art. There is a world of difference between pictures taken on your phone and pictures taken by a professional with the necessary equipment.

How many photos have you taken on other vacations or at other events? Where are they? Probably still in your camera or downloaded to your computer and lost among the other thousand images there. Will you ever have time to go through all those images and find the ones that are good and have them printed? The answer is probably no. No one really has time for that. It is a giant hassle.

The hassle is not even the major problem; it is the doctoring of the photos. Do you have the software and the training on that software to correct the colors, open little Susie’s eyes or remove that pile of beer cans from the background? In the photo of everyone standing in front of the sunset, are his or her faces so dark that you cannot tell who anyone is? The answer is probably no. While vacationing with your family in Florida, make sure to contact the professionals at Photocraft by Tom Warriner!

The importance of senior portraits

The world is waiting. You’re ready for the next chapter in your life. You’re a high school senior and will graduate in a few short months. Your parents want to take you to a professional photographer to take your senior portrait. You ask them, “Why are senior portraits so important?” And they tell you…

For many people it’s the first and last time they get a portrait taken. Capitalize on the opportunity, because you may not get another one. After high school, the “adult” world appears like the sun rising over the horizon and it’s tough to squeeze out the time to glam up and get a portrait done. Your senior portrait is a time capsule or, better yet, a fossilized piece of amber.

Amber is a unique preservationist, able to preserve an organism. Scientists have discovered a variety of things trapped in amber, including spiders, flowers and hair. This is helpful in reconstructing not only the organisms themselves, but also the ecosystems. There are worlds at our fingertips!

A senior portrait is similar, as the camera preserves your youthful essence in an amber glam shot. Exchanging senior portraits with classmates is exchanging fossils. You will not see some of your classmates for the rest of your life. Many of you are going separate ways. Senior portraits are high school archaeological records. It may be all you have left of someone, all you have left of an era.

While many associate senior portraits with girls, they appeal to boys too! The boys’ mothers are the ones who contact us for their sons’ portraits. Senior portraits represent the shift from boy to man. It is something to show children and grandchildren – “Papa in the prime of his youth.” Youthfulness is something to cherish, a familial connection between grandfather and grandson.

At Photocraft by Tom Warriner, we want to fossilize you in amber, preserve that moment when you make the leap from childhood’s end to the beginning of adulthood.

If you’re in the Rosemary Beach, FL area or anywhere on the Gulf Coast, between Rosemary Beach and Pensacola Beach, FL, including Destin and Navarre Beach, let us take your senior portrait! Don’t worry – we’ll come to you. We shoot in several counties along the coast. Contact us for pricing and availability!