
The Crying Baby Grows Up









Ty is a great kid and like many youngsters he had to adapt a celebration to the times that we’re in. 2020 was a challenging year for everybody but you wouldn’t know it spending time with this dude for his bar mitzvah which took place several months ago! This was the second time around with a mitzvah for us with this family so let’s goooo!
First let’s take a couple peaks at the session that Ally did with Ty ahead of time for some cutouts to put in the backyard for the scaled back outdoor gathering they had planned. Ty is a multi-sport athlete so we covered all the bases (pun intended) on a great day with his mom Angela! Let’s start with football…
Stud!
Now from gridiron to pitch…. soccer!
Pretty cool huh? Next we got him “throwing that speedball by ya” as Springsteen would say…
And last but not least Ty just being Ty…
Good lookin’ kid.
Fast forward to the big day and our event photographer Angela who captured these next few…
Gorgeous family!
They had the service outside at the temple:
Love that pic with proud parents Angela and Danny looking on…!
And we’ll leave you with this one from the backyard with the dunk tank! No pandemic was going to steal ALL the fun!
HAHAHAHA!!! How great is that?
And there you have it – highlights of what STILL was a great celebration! We hope you enjoyed these!
Through it all – through this challenging school year we still had a fantastic “part 1” of the Class of 2021 senior pictures! We say “part 1” because there are always a few spring seniors and we figure there may be a few more than usual this year (fingers crossed) because 2020 was……..2020.
Generally when we post highlights of our sessions we focus on the senior but we do have family add-ons available and sometimes family members – maybe just a sib or a parent or a pet jumps in, so we thought we’d gather a handful of these and give them their own blog post! Lots of love in these images!!!
No commentary – just family! We LOVE these peeps!
And there you have it! Wonderful families we’ve enjoyed spending time with over the past year! We hope you enjoyed the highlights!
We had a Maddie takeover in the D! You’ve seen Maddie on this blog before as a spokesmodel representing Mercy High School for the senior class of 2021 and her return was epic! Yes it was a little cold but we literally had downtown Detroit to ourselves early on this particular Saturday morning and we made the most of it!
We started over by the Fox Theater which is appropriate since Maddie is into theater herself! Check it out:
Cool huh? She’s a box office star to be…
We also have some fun behind the scenes first from Facebook:
Next we headed over to The Belt which was also empty and got this photo:
Okay she’s adorable.
Next stop: the DIA!
Love it!
We have more behind the scenes too – this time from Instagram:
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HELLO HAPPS!!!!!
It feels good to be recharged again with this incredible new app called Happs, but first a little context to explain why…
We’ve written and talked at length about Periscope – the livestreaming app that launched on March 26th, 2015 and we started broadcasting on on March 31st, 2015 at my buddy Alex Steinbock’s suggestion. Right away we saw incredible potential to reach people around the world and share our studio in real time. It took off for us pretty fast, and we made a big splash in the community with the first of several posts accompanied by livestreams where we did a fun take on the types of chatters and scopers you might encounter on the app. Before we knew it we were trending, gaining thousands of followers around the world and being invited to speak at the Periscope Summit in San Francisco – which we did! That was a magical weekend and a magical time in general – it’s hard to describe what it was like in this shared community of streamers from all around the world. If you were there, you know. Even the Periscope team was there to hang out even though it wasn’t “their” summit. That was nice and they were cool enough, although I’m not sure they ever totally got what was happening on their app…
It was around this time that we went beyond just scoping for fun and it became The📷Doug&Ally📷Morning Show!🎙☕️ which we did daily and are still doing to this day (more on this in a bit), along with a whole schedule of other shows on the platform including one we developed with our friends from the Periscope network channel Parachute TV called “The Photo Shop” and a game show on the Play For Stuff TV network called “The Frame Game”! We were having a blast. We continued to meet people at meetups in New York City, here in Detroit and we met more Periscopers on roadtrips in Florida, Alabama and Mississippi! We even photographed some of them. Periscope eventually monetized the app which was nice as our generous community tipped us for the work we put into the show to help make the time and “effort” sustainable (even though it didn’t usually feel like “effort”). Twitter owned Periscope and integrated it into Twitter so we thought the future was bright. Periscope had a VIP program with verified badges for people who had bigger audiences and we became silver VIPs. They had “office hours” in a Slack group to answer questions from VIPs and presumably to get our feedback as valued members of the community.
But then it changed…
Office hours suddenly started happening less and less and then they canceled the Slack group altogether. A solid year or more went by with no updated features to the app. Accounts started being randomly suspended and people – like us – got stripped of their monetization status leaving money contributed by their communities in limbo…with no explanation. What a shame. A real shame. It seemed it was only a matter of time before yet another thriving app/community would be destroyed by Twitter (Vine anyone?). We still kept on because our community was still tuning in and we were still having fun with our morning show, even starting up the Doug & Ally Morning Show Podcast, but we weren’t really innovating on the show itself anymore. Like the app, it was running on autopilot. And then just this week the announcement came – Periscope would be going away as a stand alone app. Going out with a whimper. Pathetic.
Almost instantly the buzz in the community turned to a livestreaming platform called Happs. I was a little skeptical because so many livestreaming apps have come and gone such as Meerkat, YouNow, MeVee, Blab, Busker, and yes, Periscope. But we downloaded it and set up a profile out of curiosity, and were immediately WOWED. HELLO HAPPS indeed!
This app has a dizzying array of features and yet is very intuitive to use. People suggested we move our show to Twitch for example, but I’ve spent some time on Twitch before and find it to be the most confusing user interface ever. It makes my head spin. On Happs I had us up and running in a matter of minutes and I’m blown away at what you can do there. It’s monetized which is great, you can multicast from Happs to other platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter all at the same time with all the comments from the other platforms in the same feed. You can bring other folks into your livestream on camera, and you can put up links, graphics – heck you can do just about anything that you might think would be cool to do on a livestream. There is an entire producer studio on the desktop version and you can work the controls there while you stream on your mobile device. It makes Periscope look like Prehistoriscope.
The CEO and other members of the team have been engaging with the community dropping into broadcasts answering questions, taking suggestions and they have been extremely welcoming to this huge influx of Periscope users. They are working their butts off to add servers, keep up with stability and adding features on the fly. It’s an exciting time again! They even “transferred” our Periscope VIP badge to Happs and verified our account.
So we’re all in. We certainly hope they can sustain their success and we are going to do everything we can to help. We invite you to join us in this reinvigorated community to have fun, meet people and discover new corners of the world you haven’t seen! We’ll be on in the mornings T-F sometime around 10ish to 11ish EST for fun and shenanigans and maybe even a little photography hehe…
So once again, with great enthusiasm we say HELLO HAPPS!!!
Andy is a legacy senior in the class of 2021 at West Bloomfield High School – we photographed his sister Jordyn a few years ago and we were looking forward to another hangout with mom Rebecca and the younger sib! We had plenty of fun and the results are great, if NOT surprising! Easy as ABC!
We spent the whole session at Quarton Lake which is actually pretty easy to do – there’s plenty to work with there like the dock for starters…
Great photo!
We also have some fun behind the scenes from Facebook Live:
And here are a couple more pics…
Andy’s looking great!
Loving this one in black and white too…
Pretty cool…
Here’s the TikTok from the day…
@frameablefacesGreat day with Andrew for #SeniorPictures!😁🍂 #ClassOf2021 #photoshoot #photography #frameablefaces #MetroDetroit #Seniorpics♬ original sound – Frameable Faces
We had the pleasure this past week of photographing the talented and wonderful voice of WWJ Newsradio 950’s PM Drive Anchor Jackie Paige! Her story is well known here in Metro Detroit and she has plenty of fans for good reason – she’s a real pro and you should tune in in the afternoons on AM 950. We’ve known Jackie for a bit since our sons played lacrosse and football together in high school, but this was the first time we had a real extended hangout and we really connected. She’s fun and nice and she looked fantastic – she needed a few new headshots and while we were at it we went with some fun glam as well! Let’s take a look at a few highlights!
We started with the professional pics and Jackie had the red power suit going – she looked great!
We have some behind the scenes fun as well – first from Facebook – the end is hilarious but don’t worry we added that to the TikTok as well if you scroll further…
Here’s one more from the professional side…
Now let’s get to the GLAM!
Channeling her inner supermodel! And that dress! Gorgeous.
And one more with the blowy look!
WOW right? She’s a beauty.
Here’s the TikTok with the epic sign off….hehe!
@frameablefacesHeadshots (& fun pics) with Jackie Paige from WWJ News Radio 950!🥰 #photoshoot #Detroit #MetroDetroit #photography #frameablefaces #newsreporter♬ original sound – Frameable Faces
We first met Brady in his consultation with his mom Lisa over Zoom and we liked them both right away. Not sure going into this that senior pictures were the largest object on Brady’s radar, but he’s a great kid, and he was willing to go into it with an open mind. As it turned out he went beyond that – he definitely had fun, we had fun with him, and the results are fantastic! So let’s get to it!
We met on location in Birmingham at Quarton Lake and our conditions were just fine.
Good looking dude! We love his hair.
We didn’t spend a ton of time at Quarton Lake because we wanted to focus on city pics so we headed downtown for these next couple and we have some fun behind the scenes from Facebook too:
And here are a couple results:
This next one we really love:
Great smile on this guy!
We have a fun TikTok here for you that ends in the studio which we headed back to for a couple more:
@frameablefacesVery cool session with Brady – the trifecta!🙂🏙🍂 ##seniorpictures ##ClassOf2021 ##FrameableFaces ##seniorpics ##MetroDetroit ##photoshoot ##uofdjesuit♬ original sound – Frameable Faces
And we’ll leave you with a studio highlight!
And there you have it! Brady brought his best for sure, and we hope you enjoyed the highlights of our day with him!
Wow. Let’s just say we’re pretty DARN excited to share these highlights from Taylor’s senior session…. We fell in love with both Taylor and her mom Charese pretty much immediately. You can just tell when you connect with your people, and we laughed our butts off on this session – we just had a blast and the results, well….you’ll see. Meanwhile Taylor is a senior at Detroit Country Day and she’s adorable. Funny, smart, beautiful, artistic, athletic – a quintuple threat, and we actually broke this session up into two days because we had some specialized strategies laid out to capture what we wanted, so let’s get to the highlights!
Okay so actually the smokin’ part happened on the second day. The first day we started in the studio and we’ll start there:
So cute!
We also have some behind the scenes – first from Instagram:
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At this point we headed outdoors to Birmingham where our favorite little tree was in full Pure Michigan mode! We only get this tree in the fall for a short window each year so we are always so excited when we do! Here’s a little more behind the scenes from Facebook and we have to give props to Taylor who was a real trooper because it was quite chilly…
We also got some yellows and oranges – all the Pure Michigan feels!
LOVE that one – the sweater was perfection for this photo.
Now for day two. We headed over to the track at Detroit Country Day where Taylor’s peeps were practicing – cheerleaders, football – she had an audience! And we had a WARM evening which was great. We’re obsessed with how these came out with a little off camera flash combined with some incredible natural lighting…
Wow right???
Now for the SMOKIN’ part… and first one more behind the scenes video from Facebook:
And the smoke:
Oh yeah…..
And there you have it! A smokin’ session indeed with this young lady, and we hope you enjoyed the highlights of our day with her!
Bree gave us a day to remember in Detroit with a spectacular session in the city! We’ve known Bree’s mom Heather for many years and we had a blast with the two of them! Bree is a class of 2021 senior at Walled Lake Western and she’s a multitalented girl – smart, nice, athletic and beautiful! The whole package. Let’s check out some highlights of our day with her!
So actually we’re going to start in the studio where we began the session before we headed downtown with this photo against the black backdrop:
Love it!
We also have some fun behind the scenes first from Facebook:
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