Tag Archives: metro Detroit photographer

Meet The Great Gabby – Our New Class Of 2016 Spokesmodel!

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Time to present another North Farmington Raider spokesmodel for the class of 2016 – The Great Gabby!!!  She’s not just “great” in general, but she’s cute, nice, smart and fun and this is not the first time she has been in front of Ally’s camera, as she made a little cameo in her sister Rachel’s senior pictures a year ago.

First in the studio…

So we started in the studio with Gabby and while we did some of our favorite shots on the black background we also broke out our metallic silver and our new grey fabric and played with those a little.  Let’s start with the grey and the red couch for this fun and playful shot:

Great Gabby

Nice!  Gabby has such a fantastic smile!  Okay now let’s move to the metal for this next one.  These are actual metal panels that we shoot in the studio and several seniors select this look each year – not a ton but definitely a few every year and we love it.  I’m going to take just a little credit on this one only because I saw this as a black and white with a close crop when Ally and I were going through them…  Yes I do have a bit of an eye sometimes – ha!

Great Gabby

What do you think?  And yes I think Gabby killed it here as her shirt would suggest…  I love this shot.

Heading outside…

Next it was time to head outside and our weather cooperated nicely for these next couple photos.

Great Gabby

As you can see so far Gabby can pull off the serious and thoughtful pose just as well as the happy smiley pose – she is the Great Gabby!  Let’s take a look at our fun behind the scenes vine of our day before we finish with a fun smile:

And the final smile before we go…

Great Gabby

It’s a winner!  Love having Gabby back especially as a spokesmodel representing our studio for the senior class of 2016!  We hope you enjoyed these highlights from her session!

 

What You Need To Know (So Far) About Periscope

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For those of you who don’t follow social media news closely there has been a lot going on in the last couple weeks after what I thought was a relatively quiet period.  Periscope was officially launched for the iPhone and it is going to change the world again in my opinion, much like Facebook, twitter and some of the others have.  As usual things are moving fast and it’s exciting, so here is what you need to know (so far) about Periscope.

Periscope

WHAT IS PERISCOPE?

Periscope is an app that allows you to broadcast live right from your iPhone (Android is coming soon) whenever you like.  Your followers will get a notification that you are “live” on whatever topic you say and they can tune in on the spot.  They can tap on their screen to show their approval with hearts, and make comments which you and the other viewers can see so you can answer questions and respond to the comments.

You may be familiar with Meerkat which launched before Periscope.  Personally I haven’t used Meerkat, but I have read that Periscope’s quality is better and I just don’t think Meerkat will be the winner in this battle, and it IS a battle.  The fact that twitter owns Periscope ensures its success and the integration with twitter makes it easier to set up and use if you are already tweeting.

The possibilities for where this platform will lead us are endless.  I wrote an article recently for MCP Actions where I discussed 5 ways you can use Periscope to help your photography studio – all of the ideas apply to just about any small business in some way.

Meanwhile with the exception of #2 in that article at MCP Actions most of those ideas are for ways to use Periscope as a broadcaster, but even since I wrote that piece I’m seeing new parts of the world and finding inspiration from all over the place as a viewer.

Viewing Adventures On Periscope

I love that throughout my day I can tune in to things that are happening live if I want.  Some of my faves:

  • I participated in a couple more discussions about social media marketing and photography at @RoshSillars who I mentioned in the MCP Actions article.
  • I met a hilarious pug named Rascal who lives in Vancouver and waits obediently for his food before he’s given the green light to dive in with his face deep in the bowl at @MrTommyCampbell.
  • I watched a demo of the Fj Westcott Ice Light (which we affectionately call the “Light Saber” light here at the studio) at a convention at @WestcottCo.
  • I went along on a virtual live tour of a vineyard in Washington State by the Cooper Wine Company at @CooperWine which was pretty neat.

This is all the type of content that was always readily available on the Internet.  That’s not new.  But the fact that it’s spontaneous and happening live on my iPhone where I can chime in and participate?  That IS new, and whether it’s for educational purposes or just fun, I enjoy it.  Now let’s get back to a little more on broadcasting for a minute…

Reusing and repurposing your broadcasts

The ability to reuse and repurpose the broadcasts may ultimately make this my iPhone video cam of choice for our studio and brings another layer to the potential of Periscope.  This will be more effective when landscape mode is available which is coming soon.  Right now the only way to broadcast effectively is portrait mode (vertically) which doesn’t look great in your typical widescreen formats.  But in the meantime it’s nice that you can easily download your broadcast as a video to your device with the touch of a button in the app.  We recently broadcasted parts of a high school senior spokesmodel session and we had viewers from Italy, Great Britain, and Paris.  I downloaded the broadcast to use parts of it for a Vine since it’s easy to grab portrait footage in the square frame of Vine and crop it effectively.  What was interesting was that the footage was raw – with no hearts or comments.  So keep in mind you can make your broadcast available for replay for 24 hours with all the elements of the original broadcast (comments, hearts etc.) intact, but when you download it to your iPhone those elements are stripped away.  This is different than Snapchat which keeps any added text or other animation in the video if you download it to your device.  Here is the Vine I mentioned – the indoor part on the red background was pulled from our broadcast…

As I’ve mentioned, Periscope is coming to Android soon and landscape interface for broadcasts are also coming.  Here is an article that outlines the changes they’ve made already with version 1.0.2 and previews what is to come.

I hope this helps!  Feedback is welcome and remember to download the app (it’s FREE) and follow us at @frameablefaces on Periscope!

It’s The Frameable Faces 2015 Campus Tour!

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Every now and then you need to go back to school right?  Well that’s just what we did with the Frameable Faces 2015 Campus Tour!  This year’s tour included stops in Ann Arbor and East Lansing and we had a blast hanging out with some of our favorite former seniors!  High School senior pictures are so fun for us and we get pretty close to many of our seniors so it’s really special for us to be able to visit them up at college!

First Stop – Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan Wolverines!!!

We made Ann Arbor our first stop where we met at Pizza House just like the 2013 tour, where we hung out, ate some yummy pizza and garlic bread.  Nicole Davidson (Frameable Faces class of 2011), Jarred Bratley and Cheyenne Stone (FF class of 2012), and Mara Cranis and Alanah Bratley (FF class of 2014) all met us and we caught up for a while.

2015 Campus Tour

2015 Campus Tour

Afterwards it was time to get over to Insomnia Cookies for a little dessert – YUM!

2015 Campus Tour

All in all a great day!  GO BLUE!

Next Stop – East Lansing and the Michigan State Spartans!!!

Our next stop was a dicey proposition because we planned it for a Sunday evening on the weekend of the Elite 8 and if the Spartans won on Friday they would be playing on Sunday – we just didn’t know when.  As it turned out they won and were scheduled to play on Sunday at 2, so when we rolled into town for dinner at El Azteco, the campus was buzzing since the Spartans had just punched their ticket to the Final Four.  Chelsea Cage (FF class of 2011) and Bri Dines (FF class of 2013) met us for a topopo salad feast – just like we did on the 2013 tour.

2015 Campus Tour

2015 Campus Tour

This time around we decided to change it up a bit for dessert though and go to the MSU Dairy Store for ice cream.  They have flavors in honor of the different Big Ten schools, so I got a scoop of Maize-N-Berry on top of a scoop of Buckeye Blitz.  Ha!  Delish!

2015 Campus Tour

2015 Campus Tour

Always remember if you’re the one taking the group selfie to cut off half of your face like our daughter Lacey did above – it’s a thing…  No really – it is.

One last point to make here – we are so proud of Nicole and Chelsea – the two seniors in the group.  Nicole is graduating from U of M and is continuing on to med school, and Chelsea is graduating from MSU and has been hired by General Motors!  So there it is – the 2015 Frameable Faces Campus Tour – one of our favorite things to do!

Keyaira Was Killin’ It On Her Photo Shoot!

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Keyaira was killin’ it indeed on her high school senior session and we are excited to show these photos!  We have some wonderful Spring seniors coming in from the soon-to-be-graduating class of 2015 and Keyaira and her mom Nichole were absolutely delightful, and before we get to her pictures I have to share this little side story because it’s just so typical of how we roll here and what makes it fun to meet and get to know our clients…

We met with Keyaira and Nichole on March 14th for their consultation which we do with all of our seniors – it’s really important for us to get to know our seniors ahead of time and plan their session with them so we can capture who they really are.  It’s not uncommon for the conversation to turn to food either especially if we discover any sort of ethnic background in their history.  Everybody is from somewhere but when it comes to food we’ve had Peruvian and Indian clients help us discover some amazing cuisine for example (there is another blog post coming about all of this by the way), and in Keyaira’s case there is some Mexican background among others in the family.  We thought we had our fave Mexican joint nailed down already in Taqueria San Jose in Waterford, but they told us about Jalapeńos in Pontiac and we ended up eating there twice by the time we saw them again only 10 days later at Keyaira’s session on the 24th!  YUM!!!

Okay, now that we’ve covered taste, let’s get to sight!  Keyaira’s session!

Keyaira

As I mentioned in the last couple posts we had a couple seniors coming up that would be all indoors and all outdoors.  Keyaira had a beautiful sunny day for her outdoor session and she looked fantastic!

Keyaira

Okay, we love the above photo – Keyaira looks relaxed, the backlight and breeze on her hair is great and she her smile is beautiful!

Here is the fun behind the scenes vine of our day:

Next it was time to get some city shots…

Keyaira

Love that color on her!  Let’s look at one more…

Keyaira

You would have to agree that Keyaira was killin’ it right?  She sure was.  We hope you enjoyed these highlights of her session!

 

Tori Had A “Purple Reign” On Her Senior Session!

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A high school senior who goes retro on the music for their session is a senior after our own hearts, and when Tori told us she liked Prince we were excited – we love jamming to Prince!  Besides Prince goes with purple which we already had in the game plan with our new purple backdrop.  Plus Tori’s school colors include purple and she really owned her session, so yeah – you could say Tori had a Purple Reign!

Tori came in with her mom and both of them are so nice – not to mention her grandma stopped by as well!  We were actually impressed with Tori from our first meeting when she told us her plans for college and postgraduate study – she’s a girl on a mission and she has a great game plan.

So let’s get to her pictures shall we?  We started out on the white background with Tori in her cheer uniform – love this!  Blackhawk spirit!

Purple Reign

Next let’s get to a couple on the black backdrop – love the ‘tude in these next couple photos starting with the hoodie.  A little “fierce” and a lot beautiful – so cool!

Purple Reign

I mentioned in the last blog post that the next two sessions will be one all indoors and one all outdoors.  An all studio or all location session is a nice change of pace and allows us as in this case with Tori to fully explore our studio options.  As I said earlier Tori owned this session and she really had it going at this point…

Purple Reign

Here’s our fun behind the scenes vine of the session…

Lastly we moved to the purple backdrop which we are really in love with and it really worked for Tori as you will see in this last photo!

Purple Reign

And that concludes our highlights of Tori’s purple reign!  We hope you enjoyed them!

Spokesmodeling Outside Was So Great With Cait(lin)!

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After another brutally cold winter we are finally able to get outside for some sessions and it feels so good!!! While it was still a little chilly the conditions were still pretty darn good on this one and we have to say that spokesmodeling outside was SO great with Caitlin!!!  We saw a bunch of deer and were treated to the sounds of a particularly industrious woodpecker too!

As for our spokesmodel, well the pictures will speak for themselves!  Caitlin is beautiful and a total sweetheart!  A total natural in front of the camera, we were looking forward to photographing her and this session didn’t disappoint.

Let’s start with a couple of studio shots before we head out to one of our favorite meadows, beginning with our black background:

Spokesmodeling OutsideWe love Caitlin’s style – so far the class of 2016 is really bringing it!

Next let’s look at one on the white background which is nice and simple and you can never go wrong with it.  As excited as we were to go outside, more often than not our seniors do a combination of studio and on location so we usually highlight both with our spokesmodels wherever possible.  It’s not a rule by any means – we’ve had seniors who have done all inside or all outside.  Either way we go for three hours and it’s really just personal preference.

Spokesmodeling Outside

Here is our fun behind the scenes vine as we get set to go outside!

First we hit the meadow and we were pleased to find it looking particularly “meadowy” with tall reeds and the sunlight was great!

Spokesmodeling Outside

The combination of her outfit with those shoes is fantastic!  The backlight on her hair is beautiful and this was the first time we took this chair outside.  This shot just came together perfectly.

You may know if you’ve followed us for a while that sometimes if a senior uses a new prop or pioneers a new spot it gets named for them.  On this session we found “Caitlin’s rock”!  This is a nice shot to end with for now – hazy and soft.

Spokesmodeling Outside

So that’s it for now – we hope you enjoyed these highlights from Caitlin’s stunning session and we are looking forward to more outdoor shots as it continues to warm up and Spring starts to bloom.  Ironically we have two class of 2015 senior sessions to highlight coming up – one all indoors and one all outdoors – so stay tuned!

Two Little Rock Star Brothers (and their mommy)!

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Photographing brothers at four and two years old in theory can be an adventure, and these two rambunctious rock stars were anything but boring!  They were total hams and they had us cracking up.  Alternately having fun with each other, fighting, smiling, running, and touching stuff – so in other words basically they’re perfect.  Ha – you’ll see that in the end they totally rocked it and they are just gorgeous kids!

We went for the simple casual look with jeans and white t-shirts for the most part and their mom jumped in for a few really cute photos as well.

Let’s start with a couple individual shots of our rock star brothers – one in color of the two year old:

Rock Star BrothersAnd one of older brother in black and white…

Rock Star Brothers

How awesome are they?  They were dancing and rocking out to the “gummy bear song” and various versions of the gummy bear song for most of the session.  It was quite hilarious, and let’s look at the behind the scenes vine of our time together while we’re at it – love this:

Now we will take a look at one of our photos with mommy – there are a few of these from the session and we really like the story of this one.  Little guy looking around while mommy is loving on him and holding big brother while he focuses on the camera.  Everyone touching, everyone connected.

Rock Star Brothers

Love it.

Lastly let’s take a look at a shot of the two brothers together – brothers and friends!

Rock Star Brothers

So there it is – two little rock star brothers and their mommy.  We were so happy to have them here and we are thrilled to have them on our blog!  We hope you enjoyed the highlights from their session!

Frameable Birds and Gators From The Florida Everglades!

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Frameable birds and gators from the Florida Everglades you ask?  Yes!  We recently took a family road trip down to Florida and we did our typical itinerary of Civil War Battlefields such as Lookout Mountain, Resaca, Kennesaw Mountain and Olustee, local eateries such as McKinley’s Bread Shop & Deli in Shelbeyville, KY, The Bear’s Den in Macon, GA, Padrino’s and Flakowitz in South Florida, as well as our traditional stop for Skyline Chili in Ohio.

Here’s a shot of our fam at the Olustee Battlefield in Florida taken by the friendly park ranger with my iPhone:

Cohen family at Olustee Battlefield

Meanwhile part of our Florida trip entailed driving from Delray Beach on the East coast to Captiva Island for a wedding on the Gulf Coast which took us through Alligator Alley which is the stretch of I-75 that cuts straight through the Florida Everglades.  It’s a straight shot without much civilization along the way although there is certainly a ton of wildlife including (of course) plenty of alligators!  You can see them just hanging out on the side of the highway on the other side of the fence that runs along the side of the whole drive – they can’t really get to the highway.  However it’s hard when you’re traveling at 70 mph to get a good look, so we turned down one of the few crossroads where there wasn’t much traffic, put on our hazards, and looked for gators…

Screenshot 2015-03-03 14.46.29

That cross road in the center of the map (route 29) is where we were, and it didn’t take long before we saw one gator after the other just on the other side of the little creek that ran along the side of the road.  Here there was no fence – just a guard rail, so Ally pulled out her camera and shot from the car as you can see here:

Ally photographing a gator

Every now and then Ally shoots some landscapes or wildlife when we are on a trip just for fun and inspiration and while this is not our niche we like to share them for fun!  Plenty of gators and exotic birds – we aren’t bird watchers so if anyone wants to help us identify these please share in the comments!

Florida Everglades Of all the alligators we saw, we only saw one of them actually move…  Most of them were just chilling out.  As a side note I did do a little basic research to confirm that these are indeed gators and not crocs and I’m reasonably sure they are alligators.  Now let’s take a look at some birds:

Florida Everglades

And a few more shots…

Florida Everglades

Florida EvergladesFlorida EvergladesFlorida EvergladesThe best photo op we had was when we spotted two gators hanging out together – the one up on the bank was the one who moved – as we were pulling away he slid down into the water to join his friend for a little swim.

Florida Everglades

Florida EvergladesSo there you have it – some fun photos by Ally in Alligator Alley!  We hope you enjoyed these!  See ya later gators!!!

MAXimum Spokesmodeling For The Class of 2016!

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Time for some highlights of our second spokesmodel session for the class of 2016 – our first boy and our first North Farmington Raider – Max!  We have known Max for a long time and over the last year or so he’s been lobbying for his shot in the spotlight, and we can definitely say that when his time came he made the most of it!  We had a lot of fun on this session – you might even say it was “on fire” – but more on that later…

Max’s mom joined us for part of the shoot and we have also known her for years so this was really a great day.  Let’s get to it…

Much like our last spokesmodel session with Rachel we kept it simple with Max, starting with the white background.  White is always a good look and works on most any wall.  We’ll start with a full length shot:

Maximum SpokesmodelingJust a nice casual look with a cool hoodie – Max is the man.  Let’s change Max into a t-shirt and crop him in a little closer now – parents really like to see their senior’s face!

Maximum Spokesmodeling

Stud!  Next we broke out the black backdrop for a little more of a dramatic look…

Maximum Spokesmodeling

Lastly here is where the session got a little “heated” – if you’ve followed our blog in the past you can guess what we mean – take a look at our fun behind the scenes vine of the day!

And here is the fiery result – this time we had the flames coming off of some sweet Jordans…

Maximum Spokesmodeling

Not to worry – no seniors or Nikes were harmed in the making of this photo.  Haha…  And so there you have it!  MAXimum spokesmodeling with Max!  Looking forward to more of the new class of 2016 crew and sharing them with you!

Class of 2016 Spokesmodels – Off And Running With Rachel!

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Yes it’s that time of the year again when we start preparing for the upcoming class of 2016 senior photo season with highlights of our awesome new spokesmodels!  This is always a very exciting time for us as we enter into these new relationships with these impressive young future leaders as they inspire us and make us laugh.  Making new friends is the best part of what we do and our new roster is shaping up to be another wonderful crew.  While this winter may not be quite as brutal as last year’s was, it’s been pretty cold lately so we’ll probably be starting off with a lot of studio work which is fine since we had to replace some backdrops that we lost in the “great Frameable Faces flood of 2015”.

Meanwhile Rachel is the first spokesmodel we would like to share photos of with you and the only one we photographed before the flood hit us.  She’s a West Bloomfield Laker and she’s great – she’s a dancer, she’s on the pom team and she’s just a cool girl all around.  We’re happy to kick it off with her, so without further adieu here we go – off and running with Rachel for 2016!

First we started with our black background which we played around with a bit – the blowy, a couple outfits and we’re going to start off with this soft black and white shot with this cute headband. Running With RachelRachel looked great and with her we focused mainly on just her – simple, solid colors, a variety of outfits and Rachel’s smile.  Now would probably be a good time for a shout out to Gloria at The Beauty Lounge for the makeup!  Let’s look at the brown background next:

Running With Rachel

This is a great combo for her skin tone, hair and the maroon and beige colors.  As we did last year we are continuing with our fun behind the scenes vines of our sessions and here is Rachel’s:

Let’s move to the blue that you see in the vine next… the different colors seem to bring out different shades of color in her beautiful eyes!

Running With Rachel

And lastly we broke out the red and we love the way Rachel was engaging with the camera at this point in the session – really owning it!

Running With Rachel

So there it is, and yes we’re off and running with a new class of spokesmodels – off and running with Rachel!  Stay tuned as we introduce you to the rest of our crew one by one over the next couple of months as we lead into the new senior class!