The weather has been absolutely beautiful this month, nothing like January at all.  Today was no exception so after church we decided to go exploring to find a new place to hike.  One of the things I adore about where we live is the diversity in the landscape.  Our house backs to “open space” with golden hills and scrub oak trees.   We can drive less than an hour west and hit the Pacific Ocean.  And just up Highway 24 we can enjoy redwood forests and lush vegetation.  Today we headed to the trees.  It felt like a different world once we entered the trail.  The redwoods towered above us letting pockets of light in here and there.  The scent of Eucalyptus hung in the air. It was cool and moist and everything was incredibly quiet, it was almost eerie.  The kids said they felt like they were in Jurrasic Park.  I would have to agree.  It was magical.  A stream and a bridge and all was well with the world.  We’re going back again soon!

Don’t stop here.  Continue around the circle and take a peek at what everyone’s been up to this month starting with Jennifer Nguyen | Snails and Pigtails Photography | Temecula, CA Photographer.  Keep clicking through the circle and you’ll end up right where you started.

MPIX is a the consumer lab I recommend to all of my clients who order digital images. They not only offer fantastic print quality,  but they have a huge selection of products as well.   Their customer service is amazing and they are FAST!  Orders are usually sent out within 24 hours after ordering (if received before noon, they can go out the same day).  To help you in your printing endeavors, I’m thrilled to announce this giveaway!

GIVEAWAY:

Mpix is giving away one 16×24 foam-mounted standout!  (an $80 value)  I love standouts because they are ready to hang or to prop on a shelf, and they are lightweight and easy to display.  

HOW TO ENTER:

1.  Check out their website and leave a comment HERE about your plans to print and display your photos this year.

2.  ”Like” Mpix on Facebook.

3.  ”like” Wendy VonSosen Photography on Facebook.

4.  Share this giveaway (on your blog, your favorite forum, FB, Twitter)!  Tell me how you did it in the comments.    

Please leave a comment for each of the above.  One entry for each.  

Please leave a valid email address so Mpix can contact the winner AND they will be emailing a print discount to ALL who enter!!!

You can enter each method once a day each day until the contest ends on Tuesday January 31 at 8:00 PM PST.  After the contest ends, I will be randomly choosing a winner who will be announced on Wednesday morning! 

Good luck!!!

These are my two girls.  They both have the best. hair. ever.  I’d like to say bribery was not involved in this little session, but that would be a lie.  We did have to whip out the peanut butter jar for a few of these shots.  I love how they turned out.

My son turned five not too long ago.  I love that on my walls are my favorite images of him – the ones that reflect the pure boy that he is – through these last five years.  Like I said in my blog post “I Can’t Afford It” on custom photography, I want the images that show their individual idiosyncrasies.  The images that transport me back in time to feel the emotions I feel at the moment of the image capture.

I love how it feels to look back on my maternity images and remember the expectant joy and anticipation I felt the day it was taken.  I love seeing his big chubby cheeks that are so long gone.  I love how his smile is so exactly, precisely the same as it was when he first smiled.  And I love seeing just how opposite my three-year-old daughter’s images are.  She looks so very different at each stage, and yet her lips are distinct and remarkable and identical throughout all her other changes.

I love how it is our HISTORY that is being recorded on our very walls.  I love the legacy of it being written for their little souls to read and remember.  I hope that the display of the images of our family on our walls in yet one more way for us to communicate to them that we love them, we are so proud of them, and that we enjoy them.   It doesn’t take a big event to cause us to sit down and look through boxes or albums of photos – we take this memory journey every day as we walk the rooms of our home.  Early on we decided on a philosophy to guide us through family and financial decisions – we wanted to focus on making memories, rather than collecting things.  I love how the photos on our walls contribute to our value of memories.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that my love for gallery type displays does stem from the fact that I’m a horrible decision maker.  Everything is my favorite.  So instead of having to choose 3 images, I create galleries that let me choose 10, 20, or perhaps even more.

It started with the gallery display that Tina Wilson at Tina Wilson Photography designed for me with my favorite size – 10x20s.  We filled that with images from our year’s worth of sessions with her.  It is in my living room now.   I love it.  I’ve only replaced two of the images – I just can’t bare to part with any of them.  The two I replaced just moved to our bedroom.  I think I may very well end up just adding onto this display.  I still have wall space, right?

I have two other small groupings on the two walls flanking my feature wall.  And then I have a gallery wrapped canvas from our family photo session in 2010 in between the two large windows on the wall opposite the big feature grouping.  (I took these images on Christmas Day, so please forgive the holiday decorations)

The hallway was another space in my house with plenty of blank wall space that was begging for fun images.  I got creative with arranging frames that I had collected over the years.  I do love the result.  Plus most of these are 4×6 photo size, which means I can easily and cheaply change them out as much as I wish.  And then you can see another canvas to the right side of my front door.  I love how I see this beautiful memory of my son’s first trip to the beach every time I walk toward the stairs.

Later on, we had family photo sessions with Picsee Studios and I had a lot more images that I needed to display.  I was inspired by this idea that I saw in a Martha Stewart magazine;  two long rows of frames with a common horizontal line for the bottom of the top row frames and the top of the bottom row frames.  I morphed the idea so that the frame edges formed a huge rectangle and everything was filled in in the middle.  I’m an engineer and I like straight lines.  What can I say?  So my dining room transformed into this – Pace Family Central.

To do this, I physically laid out my design on the floor in front of the wall I put the frames on.  I played until I got the spacing just right.  I started with the top left frame on the wall and went from there when it came time to actually hanging the frames.  I kept with a similar ‘frames forming a larger rectangle’ theme for the other large wall space in the room.  It is two 10x20s on the bottom, two 8x12s on the top with an 8×8 in the middle.

Do you see the Albums displayed in the middle of the dining table?  I have around 10 photo session albums there, because I fall in love with every single image and cannot bare to part with any and must have them all in an album.  I have two black iron book hangers that are designed to be mounted on the wall.  I’m waiting to mount those under the two smaller frames you see in the bottom left picture below… once we have time to remove the hideous wall paper.

As time has passed, I’ve replaced some of the images with ones I’ve taken myself.  Shamefully though, I’ve not updated the images in about a year.  Perhaps that can be a project for this spring.  But perhaps we should address the hideous wall paper first.  Toile is soooooo not me.  It was in the house when we moved in (gasp) five years ago.  It’s on the list to tackle and remove.  We painted the living room in the awesome teal on the left in the below brochure (in November 2010… yikes).  The dining room will be this awesome avocado green…. Someday… so please just pretend my awesome black frames and displays are on this cool avocado green in these photos I’ve shared today, instead of weird rooster yellow and blue toile.

Lastly, we did a room makeover for our little girl for her birthday this year.  It included two gallery wrapped canvasses that we loved of her. I couldn’t share our home’s photo displays without including these.

One of my favorite things about “after Christmas” is taking down and putting away Christmas.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m just as enthusiastic to put it up the first of December.  But I just relish the feeling of “clean” and “orderly” and “clutter-free” when Christmas is packed away again for another year.  It helps me prepare for the new year and new goals and a fresh start.  And I find that when everything is packed away back into the garage, I get the itch to rearrange furniture and redecorate a little.  For me January is a month of new beginnings.

This past year, my goal has been to print and display more of my own art/images in my home.  I found that I spend the majority of my “work time” shooting, editing, and printing  clients’ work and , while I do spent lots of time shooting for myself, my own personal images are often left on my hard drive hoping to one day see the light of day. I wanted to print and display the pictures of my own kids so that they could enjoy them in our home.  I also wanted to offer ideas for clients who may be struggling with how to use the images from their own sessions in their homes.  Once I made that my goal, I was perplexed as to where and how to display them.  I scoured the internet and Pinterest looking for inspiration.  And while I found many ideas, it sparked a curiosity of how my friends have used and displayed photographs in their own homes.  And how many, like me, haven’t.

So, I’ve invited 32 of my fellow photographer friends to guest blog here every day during the month of January and share how they use and display their own photographs in their homes.  I hope you’ll come by and get ideas and inspiration from these talented women to use in your own homes!

Tomorrow I will kick off the project and the new year with Joyce Smith of Joyce Smith Photography!

Happy New Year!

Join me as I make my way around our little circle this week continuing with Kara jo – Memphis Tennessee Photographer.

Happy Weekending!  Last one before Christmas!

This is Dave.  Apparently he had a hard night last night and had a run-in with the mini-figs.  While maybe not original, completely true.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he retaliates against them tonight…  It’s always fun to see where he ends up every morning.  He seems to like it here at our house considering that the boys left him a medicine cup full of water, a bottle cap full of oreos and some pretzel pieces the other night.  I think they’re hoping he’ll tell Santa about that instead of the incident with the rougue mini-figs.

Next stop in our circle this week, the talented Maureen Wilson | Mccomb,Mississippi Photographer.

This year since we’re in a new house, we decided to haul out our massive tree to see if it would “fit” (which is really a relative term depending on what you consider “fit” to mean).  Although it takes up most of our living room, and since we really had no desire to take it down once it was set up, it will stay this year.  And, or course, the kids’ tree always comes and is adorned with all the ornaments the kids have gotten through the years.  It’s perfectly tacky and kitchy with its multi colored lights among the white branches.  I love it!  And with a little help from the cousins, it was decorated in record time.

I hope you are all enjoying the craziness that comes with December!

Please tell me your garage looked similar to this:

The kids LOVE going through the ornament boxes and unwrapping each ornament while reminiscing on Christmases past.

Our monster tree required a ladder and some brave souls to reach the tip top.

No matter how hectic we get during this month, our family always takes time to appreciate the true meaning of Christmas and the Gift of the Savior.

For the next stop in the circle, please visit my sweet friend  Jennifer Nguyen | Snails and Pigtails Photography | Temecula, CA Photographer to see what she’s been up to this past month.

Happy Monday!

This week’s theme:

This is our “littlest” Little and our furry Big.  It took quite a bit of Costco cheese bread (which is yummy, btw, and not something I would generally recommend indulging your dog with but sometimes you gotta do whatcha  gotta do) to get Molly to cooperate but we ended up with this.

The circle continues with Miss Maureen Wilson | Mccomb Mississippi Photographer who has the cutest southern accent ever.

So, since Halloween is almost upon us, here’s a little fun for your Friday.

Next in line this week,  Maureen Wilson | Mccomb Mississippi Photographer.

Happy Friday!

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