Before These Wedding Negatives Are Gone, Think About Who Else Was There

For more than 40 years, I photographed weddings and families throughout the Gainesville area, and I still have many of those original wedding negatives in my files.

A wedding was more than photographs of a bride and groom. It may have brought together parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and old friends who are no longer with us. For some families, these negatives may contain photographs of people who were rarely photographed anywhere except at a wedding or, sadly, a funeral.

I understand that not every marriage lasted and not every bride or groom looks back fondly on that day. But the photographs may hold something much larger than the marriage itself — a record of the family and the people who were there.

After all these years, I need to clear these old negative archives. My goal is to complete that process by the end of this year. Once the negatives are gone, they cannot be replaced.

If Mike Shea Photography photographed your wedding, or the wedding of a family member, please contact me now. The original negatives could become an unexpected gift for a parent, child, grandchild or someone else in the family — and preserve photographs they may not even know still exist.