Tag Archives: Ally Cohen

The Frameable Faces Restoration Project!

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Polish WeddingI have always had a keen interest in history on many levels.  In addition to my own personal interest in reading books and visiting historical sites I’ve tried to find ways to incorporate history into Frameable Faces.  Not only are we capturing moments and preserving them forever when we photograph our clients, I have blogged about historical photos of American Presidents, I’ve dabbled with my Life Preservers idea on and off to do interviews with people about their personal histories and I have written about photo restoration.  This leads us to the restoration project…

Photo restoration is a special opportunity for us to help people preserve and even recover a piece of their own history that has been damaged or thought to be lost.  When someone brings in a damaged photo, we have it restored to pristine condition and return it to them and we see the tears of emotion and joy that pour out when they see the results – these are some of the best moments we have here.

Here are a couple of examples:

A lady brought in this last photo she had of her late brother from before he went off to war.  He returned from fighting but he was never the same.  This photo was faded, browned, torn, taped, incomplete and stapled to a manilla envelope (you can actually see the staple at the top of his hat).  It meant a lot to her and it meant a lot to us to present it back to her completely restored.  This is such important work.  Helping people reclaim their history.

The Frameable Faces Restoration Project

Next one of our seniors had a photo of his mom from her passport from when she came to this country as a young child.  It is the only photo that exists of her from before she came to America.  It was tiny and had part of the raised stamping from the passport on it – not exactly in great condition.

Here’s the before:

Restoration Project

Here’s the after:

Restoration Project

Next we have a baby picture of a lady who came to the studio while in her 90’s.  Such a sweet lady, Lucille’s photo had some damage around the edges from the frame it was in, a couple of creases and stains, and the photo was fading a little.

Here’s the before:

Restoration Project

Here’s the after:

Restoration Project

Here is a case of some damage and significant fading on this one… the photo was really starting to disappear and it was small – we couldn’t make it much bigger but we definitely brought her back…

The before:

Restoration Project

 

The after:

Restoration Project

 

Here’s a color wedding photo that had been significantly damaged and faded over time that just needed to be brought back to life…

Before:

Restoration Project

 

After:

Restoration Project

 

We could go on and on with examples of photos we’ve restored…

Enter Periscope and the Restoration Project…

The element we are adding to make this more of a project is the live video element.  We have an amazing community of people we have connected with literally all around the world on Periscope.  If you are unaware of Periscope it is a live streaming app owned by twitter and you can download it and follow us at @frameablefaces at this link.

At any given time in one of our live broadcasts you can be a part of a social video watching and chatting in real time with people from Australia, Israel, Turkey, Brazil, The UK, France, Russia, Malaysia, Serbia, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Germany, Spain, Morocco, Ukraine – the list goes on and on.  If someone in Sweden has an old damaged photo they want to restore they can scan it and send it to us digitally.  Periscope has allowed us to connect with people all over the world!

So with the Frameable Faces Restoration Project we are giving people the opportunity to come on to our channel to show the before and after photos and share the story of the photo with the rest of our community.  We can then record these and put them all together on a playlist on our YouTube channel.  If you don’t want to come on and do a live interview and would prefer to just give us the story separately for the blog that’s fine too!  The main thing is sharing stories with our community, bringing us together, reclaiming and restoring history!

Contact us for details if you’re interested!  You can call the studio at 248-790-7317, email me at doug@frameablefaces.com, or DM us on twitter at @frameablefaces

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Frameable Faces Photography
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Frameable Faces Photography is a small biz retail mom & pop shop of Doug&Ally Cohen located in the Orchard Mall in West Bloomfield, Michigan, United States Of America!
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Ally & Doug can be reached at the studio at tel:248-790-7317 or emailed at mailto:info@frameablefaces.com
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Being “Frameable” is an attitude, a community, a way of life – a life you would want to celebrate and display on your walls for all to see!  Tell us… ARE YOU FRAMEABLE?
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Join the Frameable Faces Community – sign up for our email newsletter for the best of the week in the Frameable Faces World!  Click here!

 

The Thrill Of The Chase…The Sequel – His Senior Portraits!

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Chase has been one of our spokesmodels for the soon-to-be graduating class of 2016 and you may remember his spokesmodel session on this blog.  Chase has a lot going on as we’ve said before with his business with a couple of buddies PWR Detroit, and he’s heading to Indiana University in the fall!  Meanwhile with some scheduling and weather issues for his scheduled senior session we ended up breaking up this session into two different days for the studio half and the location half.  No worries – just more days to hang out with this guy….

Chase In The Studio…

Let’s start with the studio session which was first where we kept it pretty clean and simple.  Here we will highlight a couple photos against the white background….

Chase Note the PWR Detroit bracelet….  🙂

Just relaxed casual looks here – dig it.

Chase

Now let’s take a look at some behind the scenes footage from our day(s).  First with our 6 second looping vine…

Next we have the replays of the live Periscope broadcasts from the two days from our YouTube channel.  If you haven’t downloaded Periscope yet you can do so and follow us at @frameablefaces here!

First the studio part…

And now the location part!

To Birmingham…

We reconvened on another day to head out to Birmingham for the location part of the portraits and we’ll share a couple of those highlights here:

Chase

That one was pretty cool because we weren’t expecting to show up and find a fresh coat of paint a completely different color than that wall used to be!  Very cool…  Okay one more:

Chase

And there you have it!  The thrill of the Chase – the sequel!  We’ve enjoyed having Chase represent the studio this year and we hope you’ve enjoyed the highlights from our time with him!

Great Scott! What a senior session and what a senior!

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Great Scott!  What an appropriate exclamation for Scott’s senior session!  We love this kid – he and his mom Marilyn are such a blast to be around and for us it was a lot of fun because Scott reminds us a lot of our son Tony.  He looks like him and he even talks and acts like him a little – it’s crazy!  The guy is an accomplished baseball player at Orchard Lake St. Mary’s Prep High School and that’s where we went to get some photos of this defending state champ at his home diamond.

Great Scott…

But before we went on location to the field of dreams we started with some photos here in the studio on the black background, and you know what that could mean right?  Athlete, black background, could be some fire involved…..   But first we have a simple shot of Scott just being Scott – check it out:

Great Scott

That’s one good looking dude.

Okay so next Scott broke out a baseball bat and yep – we set it on fire for this cool photo:

Great Scott

Awesome!

Now let’s take a look at some behind the scenes action from the day – first with our 6 second looping vine:

Next we have the Periscope replays from our YouTube channel.  You won’t see the live comments in these broadcasts but there was indeed a live audience commenting including Scott’s girlfriend who saw the notification in her twitter feed, grabbed the app and jumped into the conversation in the location segment of the replay – that was a first for us and it was hilarious!  You can download Periscope here and follow us at @frameablefaces!

To The Diamond…

As you saw in the live video we took a few photos around the campus, but we ended up at the baseball field where we’ll highlight a couple of great photos from the dugout…

Great Scott

And one more…

Great Scott

And there you have it!  Great Scott indeed!  We hope you enjoyed the highlights of our day with him!

 

 

Havin’ Fun With Haven On Her Spokesmodel Session!

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Haven is a gem.  We’ve known this for a while since her older sister Jubilee was a spokesmodel for us for the class of 2015 and Haven has been friendly with our daughter Lacey since they started high school.  Notice a theme here?  Our spokesmodels this year are largely “Lacey approved” since this is her graduating class!  Haha – well that hasn’t actually been our main criteria but we think Lacey has good taste and we had a feeling that Haven would be a great spokesmodel when we met her a couple years ago.  We decided to spend Haven’s whole session in the studio since our weather wasn’t so cooperative and as we’ve always said sometimes it’s nice to just stay in the studio to relax and play with some different combinations, colors, backdrops, furniture, floors etc…  So yes – we were havin’ fun with Haven!

Havin’ Fun With Haven…

So we started out with the tan paper backdrop which was perfect for Haven’s first outfit.  We love the earth tones here along with her skin tone – it all comes together really nicely!

Haven

Oh and it doesn’t hurt that she’s stunningly gorgeous!

We also experimented on this day for the very first time with our new Snapchat on-demand geofilter!  Our Periscope friend Vincenzo Landino wrote this article on these and we jumped on it!  It worked out nicely and we’ll be playing with this more down the road – it’s not permanently available but we’ll announce the days it’s on on twitter.  Here is a snap that Haven herself sent out that day… the little circle in the middle of her forehead is the snapchat timer while I was grabbing the screenshot.

Haven

Check out the snazzy Frameable Faces filter!

Here is the geofence we submitted to snapchat that shows where the filter was available – in and around our studio and down the common hallways of the mall!

Here is the first snapchat video we sent out with our filter – as you can see we had some snapchat fun that day!

Okay let’s get back to a few more photos…!

Let’s move on to the purple background – this purple is really vibrant and we combined it with our light wood floor and a molding to create a “room” look:

Haven

Let’s also check out some more behind the scenes – first with a fun little looping Vine:

…and next we also have a couple replays of our live Periscope broadcasts from our Katch.me page – if you haven’t downloaded Periscope yet you need to!  Tune in for Frameable Faces TV at @frameablefaces by downloading the app here!

At this point we moved to the grey backdrop with a chair that we used for the first time a couple years ago with Haven’s sister Jubilee!  We love the way it’s ripped up in the front…

Haven

Now let’s check out our second broadcast from the session during which time we switched to the black backdrop:

And here is one of the results!

Haven

That’s a fantastic note to end this on….  we are thrilled to have this girl representing our studio this year and we look forward to her senior session later in the year!!!  We hope you enjoyed the highlights of our day with her!

A Breathtaking Example Of Maternity And Serendipity

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Serendipity is an amazing thing when it happens.  When you get swirled up in it and you know something special is happening it’s an amazing and rare experience.  Do you know what serendipity is?  Here’s the official definition:

Serendipity

Now here’s the way it went down on March 16, 2016 at Frameable Faces…

Me: Frameable Faces this is Doug!

Phone Caller: Uh hello – we have a bit of an urgent situation here with a maternity session….  um – you see my wife…. well are you available to take photos of my wife today?

Me: Wait – is she in labor?????

Phone Caller: Well no she’s not in labor – it’s not an emergency like that or anything.  Let me explain.  Here’s what happened…

What happened was that Nick and Jen were 36 weeks pregnant and had a maternity photo session planned with another studio that day.  They were all prepared with clothing and Jen had her hair and makeup done only to be told that the studio had double booked them and they were out of luck.  Sorry, no go, thanks for playing.  Nick did a quick search on Yelp, came across Frameable Faces and took a chance with a phone call.  Now keep in mind that this is NOT how we do photo sessions here.  We don’t take walk-ins as a general rule with no consultation ahead of time to plan the session where we can get to know the clients and make sure everyone is prepared and on the same page.  But these folks were in a bind and we didn’t have any appointments that afternoon – and my gut (after checking with Ally) said to go with it.

Serendipity…

We were not expecting a session that day, and they were not expecting to have to shift gears and drive almost a half hour to a studio they didn’t know on the fly for a maternity session which can be a relatively intimate affair.  But from the moment they walked in we connected – it felt right and it turned out to be one of the best maternity sessions we’ve ever done.  What a wonderful couple – we even broadcast some of the session live on Periscope and you can watch the replay below, but before we get to that let’s see a couple of the photos!

Serendipity

How cute are they?

We used two different backdrops starting with the black above and the next photo is also on the black with the sari stretched out behind Jen and her hair gently blowing – beautiful!

Serendipity

Now let’s take a look at our behind the scenes action from the session.  First we have our fun 6 second looping Vine:

Now we have the replay of the live Periscope broadcast from our YouTube page!  If you haven’t downloaded Periscope yet you should do so immediately!  You can follow us there (and just about everywhere else) at the handle @frameablefaces at this link:

Here is the link to the broadcast.

Now let’s get back to a couple of gorgeous photos of Jen on the white background.  So beautiful, so angelic!

Serendipity

Breathtaking indeed…  And we’ll leave you with one more:

Serendipity

We can’t wait to meet the baby!  Maybe, just maybe you’ll have a chance to meet the baby here too!  We were thrilled to be able to meet these two, photograph them and present them to you!  We hope you enjoyed the highlights – serendipity indeed.

 

Maya Mia! Maya Is A Fabulous Spokesmodel!

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Maya Mia!  See what we did there?  Another fabulous spokesmodel and especially one that is keeping the developing tradition of amazing seniors from Birmingham Groves!  We love all of our seniors from all of the schools (obviously our North Farmington Raiders for example since we are Raiders ourselves) but it is worth mentioning the love we have for our Groves peeps as a whole – there’s just something about those Falcons!  Maya is our latest Falcon and you’ve already seen Maya a couple times on the blog since we posted a behind the scenes fisheye shot from her double spokesmodel session with Aria and she already appeared in the broadcasts that we posted with Aria’s highlights.  We will post those broadcast replays again here for those who have landed here for the first time.  But first let’s look at a couple photos of Miss Maya shall we?

Maya Mia!

We started out in the studio with the blue/grey fabric backdrop before we headed downtown to Detroit – here’s one of those:

Maya Mia

Love the color coordination here and Maya looks gorgeous!

We also have to say that Maya is a total character once you get to know her a little – she definitely had us cracking up.  Her mom Julie is pretty awesome too…  To prove we’re not kidding here’s a little example of “spokesmodel parkour” with Maya – hilarious….

Maya Mia

“Spokesmodel Parkour” lol

As you may have seen on Aria’s post we didn’t spend a ton of time in the studio and at this point we headed down to Detroit.  For Maya’s highlights we are going to focus on the Belt Alleyway – such a cool spot!  There is a lot to work with there starting with this little alleyway within the alleyway!

Maya Mia

So cool.

Now let’s get to our fun behind the scenes action – first with our 6 second Vine for your looping pleasure!

Next we have the “encore” presentations of our Periscope broadcasts from our Katch.me page.  You can download the Periscope app and follow us so you can come along for the ride on future photo sessions and lots of other fun stuff at @frameablefaces at this link!  First the broadcast from the studio:

Next we have the broadcast from the Detroit location!

Now let’s get to a couple more photos of our wonderful spokesmodel!

Maya Mia

Those eyes!!!

Okay we’ll leave you with this last one with one of the cool murals that are all over the place down there…

Maya Mia

Maya Mia!  Right?  Beautiful girl!  Okay so there you have it!  We are pretty excited to have Maya representing our studio as we keep rolling right along gearing up for the class of 2017 season!

Ahhhhhhhh It’s Aria! Our Latest Spokesmodel!

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Ahhhhhhhh It’s Aria!  The surrealness of the class of 2017 continues as we present another upcoming senior we’ve known for almost her entire life!  Aria and our Lacey have been friends since they were toddlers and Aria’s parents are friends of ours (you’ll see Rachel in the broadcast replays later).  Aria is our latest spokesmodel from this awesome crew which has us so fired up!  She has appeared on this blog before in photos from her younger sister Sedona’s bat mitzvah and now it’s her turn in the spotlight as a spokesmodel.  Aria is one of the nicest people you will meet – smart and beautiful, she’s the whole package and we were excited for this day which led us to downtown Detroit again where we’ve been hanging out a lot lately.  If you watched the live broadcasts from this session then you know that this was also a double spokesmodel session with Maya whose photos we will be posting soon – you’ll meet Maya in the replays below as well!

Ahhhhhhhh It’s Aria!

But for now we are going to focus on Miss Aria for a bit….  We started off in the studio on the fiery red fabric background for this full length serious pose…

Ahhhhhhhh It's Aria

She’s a stunner!

Aside from the black and blowy which we’re doing with all of our female spokesmodels we didn’t spend a ton of time in the studio for this session.  The rest of the shots are in Detroit where we found some great murals and locales, but before we get to those let’s have a little fun with the behind the scenes of our day and then we’ll look at more results.  First we have our Vine of Aria for your 6 second looping pleasure:

Next we have the replays of the live Periscope broadcasts of the day from our Katch.me page which are always a lot of fun.  If you haven’t downloaded this amazing app yet you can do so and come along with us on future sessions at @frameablefaces at this link.

First we have the studio broadcast:

And next we have the Detroit City broadcast!

To the D

At this point we headed downtown to The Belt alleyway where there are amazing murals in the alley as well as the adjacent parking garage and we got some great shots!  Here are a couple – first in the garage:

Ahhhhhhhh it's AriaI like the match of the earth tones of the mural and the earth tones of Aria’s clothes…

Next we have a photo from The Belt alley…

Ahhhhhhhh it's Aria

So pretty!  Love the timely breeze giving the slightest lift to her hair there…

At this point we relocated to the Wayne County Building for this photo that we’ll leave you with:

Ahhhhhhhh it's Aria

Cute smile which says it all about Aria – she’s a happy sweet girl and we love her!  We hope you enjoyed the highlights of our time with her!

Our Very Own Spokesmodel – Lacey Lights It Up!

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Lacey lights up the blog with these highlights from her spokesmodel session, and why not?  She’s been lighting up our lives for almost 17 years – heck she was the original inspiration for the existence of what eventually became Frameable Faces when her arrival inspired Ally to pick up a camera!  We’ll try to contain our glee for sharing these photos and keep it somewhat professional, but it could be tough…. lol.

Our Very Own Spokesmodel

It is a bit surreal to say the least to be coming up on Lacey’s senior year and to have her (and even a few of her friends) spokesmodeling for the studio.  She is used to being in front of Ally’s camera as you can imagine but this was different and we approached it like we would any other senior and she delivered with the best of them.  We spent most of the session in Detroit – the city is seeing a massive comeback the likes of which we haven’t seen anything like in our lifetime so we’re spending a little time down there.  We’ll be offering Detroit sessions for an added fee this year to account for the time and travel.  Detroit is in demand and we’ve enjoyed hanging out down there a lot lately – for sessions and just for fun.

Lacey Lights

That’s our baby!  Let’s give a shout out here as well to Mandy at Mandy Rose Salon in West Bloomfield for Lacey’s makeup!

Keep in mind that there are some amazing photo ops in Detroit, but at the end of the day it still comes back to the senior.  The stunning photo above could have been any brick wall – it’s the lighting, the talent of the photographer, and the GIRL that makes the photo…

Now having said that, this next photo isn’t one you could find just anywhere and there are plenty of great spots in the city, more of which we’ll explore with other spokesmodels.

Lacey Lights

Pretty cool huh?

Before we move on to a couple more photos let’s take a look at our behind the scenes footage of our day – first with our fun 6 second looping Vine:

Next we have the replays of our live Periscope broadcasts from the day on our YouTube channel.  If you still haven’t downloaded the Apple store app of 2015 you can do so here, follow us at @frameablefaces and come along on our senior photo shoots for the rest of the class of 2017 along with lots of other shows that we broadcast!

First at the Russel Industrial Center:

Next at Belle Isle:

And lastly at the Dequindre Cut:

Lacey Lights It Up!

At this point as you saw in the broadcasts above we headed over to Belle Isle and explored a little and that’s where we captured this one:

Lacey Lights

Oh hello Lacey!  Hehe…

Lastly we headed over to the Dequindre Cut and this was one of the last shots of the evening with a little off camera flash as the light started to fade…

Lacey Lights

Love it.  And LOVE her.  And there you have it – Lacey lights us up whenever we think of her and she lit it up that day!  We hope you enjoyed these highlights of her session!  We’re pretty proud of the photos and of our girl.

Lily Leads The Way For Our Class of 2017 Spokesmodels!

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Lily leads the way for the spokesmodels of the class of 2017 with these highlights from her session and we are thrilled about it!  It’s that time of year again where we start to introduce the young peeps who will represent our studio for the upcoming class of seniors for the school year of 2016-17!  This is such a fun time for us as we put together our new team, build relationships with new friends, have amazing photo sessions and present these awesome guys and gals to you!

Lily Leads…

Lily will be a senior in the fall at Bloomfield Hills High School and she’s a really talented dancer!  She is also a friend of our daughter Lacey (also a spokesmodel) so we got the “seal of approval” on Lily….  haha!  We definitely fell for her the first time we met her – actually Ally met her before I did at a Starbucks when she was with Lacey and Ally raved about her.  Her mom Amy is a delight as well – she joined us on this session and we had a ton of fun!  We’ll start in the studio with a brand new backdrop that we got from Ambrelee Taylor at Peek A Boutique Design Co.  We actually met Ambrelee on Periscope (more on Periscope in a bit) and this is the Hollis backdrop:

Lily Leads

How adorable is she?  We love kicking off the new class with Lily!  The rest of the photos we’ll share for now are all on location at a graffiti wall and then at Heritage Park in Farmington Hills.  First the graffiti:

Lily Leads

We’ve always been a fan of that look!

Before we head on location we will continue as we did last year with our behind the scenes fun, first on Vine for your 6 second looping pleasure:

Next we have the replays of our live Periscope broadcasts from our day on our YouTube channel.  If you download Periscope you can tune in live at @frameablefaces, join in the fun and get some ideas for your own sessions at this link!

Periscope was the app of the year in the Apple Store for 2015 and it’s owned by twitter – you can join our worldwide audience in our broadcasts and you can comment along and be part of the show!  Here is the broadcast from the studio:

And here is the broadcast from on location:

Lily Leads us to Heritage Park

We had a perfect day for our location – mild as can be!

Lily Leads

And we’ll leave you with one more for now… we love hats and headbands – accessories make for some fantastic photos!

Lily Leads

Gorgeous!  If Lily’s photos are any indication, we are going to have an amazing class of seniors this year!  We hope you enjoyed the highlights from our day with her and we hope you’ll come along for the ride!

Blair’s Beautiful Wintry Blast of a Session!

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Blair’s Beautiful Wintry Blast was…..well…..a blast!!!  We alluded to this before but this winter of 2015-2016 was a tricky one.  I say that because this winter there really was no winter.  We only had a few seniors who were waiting for snow to do their sessions and we literally had just enough days with snow to make it happen.  No extras at all – no room for error or rescheduling.  When we got our precious snow we had to scramble the troops and get outside to shoot!!!  We did luck out with Blair since the day that worked out for us saw plenty of snow on the ground from a snow fall two days earlier.  Not to mention that it was considerably warmer at this point, so the conditions worked out very nicely after all!  Blair deserved it because she is a total sweetheart, and I think her pups enjoyed it too as you’ll see in a bit!

Starting in the studio…

But before we get to the white stuff let’s start in the studio where we spent a little time before heading out on location.  First on the simple white backdrop:

Beautiful Wintry Blast

Love it!

Next we brought out the black backdrop for this one:

Beautiful Wintry Blast

Beautiful girl!!!

Okay now we have a little behind the scenes action from our day for your enjoyment.  First our fun 6 second looping vine:

Next we have the full replays of our live Periscope broadcasts from our YouTube channel for your extended viewing pleasure.  If you still haven’t downloaded Periscope you can do so and follow us at @frameablefaces at this link.  First the indoor scope:

And now the outdoor scope!

Beautiful Wintry Blast, Beautiful Senior

At this point using Blair’s home as a base we headed out into the commons area of the subdivision where she lives (also the one I grew up in) for some wintry photos, and for this first one we had a couple of furry family members join us!  Say hi to Kramer and Jelly!

Beautiful Wintry Blast

Love this photo!!!

Okay one last one of Blair having a little fun in the snow…

Beautiful Wintry Blast

So pretty!  And so there you have it!  Certainly a beautiful wintry blast of a session with a beautiful Blair!  We hope you enjoyed the highlights from our day!