The Story Behind the Prints

Sep 24

Settle in for a minute. I want to share a little of my backstory with you—how I grew up around ink and paper, how that shaped the way I see photography, and why it’s become my mission to make sure your wedding photos don’t just live on a screen, but in your hands and on your walls.

In 1946, after serving as a printer aboard a Navy carrier in World War II, my grandfather, Ray Fox, opened Ray Printing on Cherry Way in downtown Pittsburgh. It was a true family business from the beginning—my grandmother Marta, and later their children, all pitched in to help. By the mid-1970s, the shop had relocated to Carson Street in Pittsburgh’s Southside, where it continued to thrive. My mother, Angel, was working there when she met my father, Scott. They married in 1978, and in 1981, I was born.

Because it was a family business, I grew up in the middle of it all. My earliest days were spent swaddled to my mother’s chest while she cut film and prepared type for press. I was surrounded by the smell of ink, the hum of Heidelberg presses, and the sense that putting something on paper made it real.

Even after my parents’ divorce, print was still the background music of my childhood. While my dad worked third-shift, I’d fall asleep in a quiet back room, soothed by the rhythmic clatter of machines producing page after page of finished work. By my teens, I was learning digital pre-press and experimenting with the family’s 35mm camera.

Two moments in 1998 cemented my path: my father asked me to photograph our family at my grandmother’s memorial, and my high school introduced photography courses for the very first time. I signed up immediately.

The following year—1999, the year I graduated high school—the world of photography was shifting. As I was falling in love with film and the craft of making prints in the darkroom, Nikon released the D1, the first DSLR to transform the news industry. Within three years, a used D1 was in my hands, and I was shooting assignments for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Whirl Magazine.

Over the next decade, as the web became the primary way to distribute images and smartphones put cameras in everyone’s pockets, photography changed. For weddings, couples often received a disk of images—but albums were ordered less and less. Many admitted, a year later, that the files were still untouched. Their stories weren’t living anywhere. Even I was guilty of the same thing—my own wedding photos, beautifully gifted to me by colleagues, had never made it into an album.

That’s when it clicked: this wasn’t just a trend. It was a problem. Couples were losing their stories in a digital sea. And if I was serious about being a professional—someone who understands the craft and its meaning—then I had to be part of the solution. Photography couldn’t stop at delivering files. It had to be finished.

That conviction drives my work today. I believe a photograph isn’t complete until it’s printed. Digital files are convenient, yes, but they’re also fragile in another way—easily minimized in importance among the endless scroll of your camera roll. Prints endure. They anchor families to their history, live in the daily spaces of their homes, and become heirlooms for generations to come.

So when I photograph a wedding, I start with the end in mind. My job isn’t just to capture your story—it’s to make sure it lives where it belongs: not in a forgotten folder, but in your album, on your walls, and in your hands.

So when you look back years from now, I don’t just want you to remember what your wedding looked like—I want you to feel it all over again. That’s why I do what I do, and I’d love to help make that happen for you.