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Another Example Of What 20 Years Of Happiness Looks Like!

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When Dena came to the studio and we started chatting we discovered that we had a couple things in common.  A couple mutual friends, sons similar ages – stuff like that.  The usual fun stuff.  So we got to discussing the session during the consultation with the usual details, what to wear, what color backdrops and those sorts of things.  We looked at Saturday May 21st as the date for the session and she said that’s cool – it’s the day after their anniversary.  We said cool – that’s two days after our anniversary!  “Oh” she said “what anniversary is it?  It’s our 20th!”  We said “What?  It’s our 20th too!!!”  How cool!  We got married on consecutive days in 1996!!!  What a great connection – celebrating 20 years one day apart and then together the day after that for a family photo session!  We knew this would be fun.

20 Years Of Happiness…

So Dena and Stephen came with their son Zak who we really liked – he seems like a great kid!!!  Don’t be shocked if you see him again on this blog in the not-so-distant future…  Let’s start with a photo of the happy family on the white background…20 years

Good looking family huh?

Now let’s focus in on just the happy couple…

20 years

Before we get to the last two photos let’s take a look at our behind the scenes footage from the day!  First with our fun little 6 second looping Vine:

Next we have the extended replay of the live Periscope broadcast from the session with a live audience!  If you haven’t downloaded Periscope yet you can do so and follow us at @FrameableFaces at this link.

Okay we have a couple more photos to show – first one of a boy and his mommy!  How sweet!

20 years

And lastly a dude and his truck!

20 years

And there you have it!  We had a great time with these guys – on a similar path as ours!  We hope you enjoyed the highlights of their session!

Nick And Jen Return – This Time With Jeralyn For Her Debut!

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Jeralyn made her highly anticipated debut at the studio with her parents Nick and Jen, who you might remember from this one of a kind story we told you about recently…  And what an eventful and amazing photo session this was!  We are so excited to present these to you!  Our story with these guys has been truly special since that first phone call.

Jeralyn Makes Her Debut…

Jeralyn

Is there anything more amazing and perfect than a newborn baby?  She’s so beautiful!  It’s so nice when you can get your model to sleep for a bit, so we turn the lights low, the heat up and we put on a little classical music to help create a nice comforting mood.

We had a few backdrops and setups planned for this session, and next we moved to some pink fluffy awesomeness so Jeralyn could open her eyes and stretch out a little, floating on her pink cloud.

Jeralyn

Before we move to our next couple shots let’s look at a little of our fun behind the scenes action and a bonus poop heard round the world – LITERALLY…

I was documenting some of the session for snapchat – that day we were featured doing a snap swap takeover of the Summit Live snapchat account.  Both our profile and the Summit profile has worldwide followings.  I hit the record button and I swear it was like it was a poop remote control because Nick and Jen were holding a naked Jeralyn when she let loose!  So hilarious…  You can see it in this 6 second looping Vine…

Wait, we’re not done.  The next morning we were laughing about this on “The Doug & Ally Morning Show” we do on Periscope Tuesday through Friday mornings and Rich Nairn who has done the artwork for the soon-to-be-ready morning show t-shirts was in the broadcast.  You have to visit Rich’s website – he’s a genius!  When he saw the footage he was inspired to do a “doodle” which he does frequently…  Here we see Jeralyn propelling herself through the air!!!  HAHA!

Jeralyn

How funny is that?

Next we have the replay of our live Periscope broadcast from the session for your extended viewing pleasure.  Needless to say our female viewers were gushing over Jeralyn!  If you haven’t downloaded Periscope yet you can get it and follow us at @FrameableFaces at this link:

Now let’s get back to a couple more amazing photos of Jeralyn:

Jeralyn

Love the black and white with her eyes open!

And one more with a beautiful sari for this photo which is actually a composite (which is the safe way to execute this pose).  What a great photo!

Jeralyn

And there you have it – our wonderful continuing story of Nick, Jen and now Jeralyn!  We hope you enjoyed the highlights from her debut!

Nick Closes Out Our Class of 2017 Spokesmodels In Style!

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Nick is next up in our Class of 2017 blog posts, and yes he’s the subject of the last of these, but he’s far from the least!  This guy is great – bursting with personality and we liked him the minute we met him.  Funny enough we ended up sealing the deal with him representing our studio as a spokesmodel when Ally and I went out to eat at Social Kitchen and Bar in Birmingham – Nick was the host that night and we didn’t even know it!  He was the first person to greet us when we walked in (we had already met with him and his mom Sally)!  Everything about that night was pretty cool as a side note – the restaurant has owners who are parents of one of our seniors, three of our former seniors work there, and now we’ve got Nick!  You should eat there – it’s awesome.

Nick Is Next…

But back to Nick.  This guy showed up with what seemed like a whole closet of clothes (according to him only a third of his wardrobe) and let’s just say the kid has style!  We joked that day and since that ya gotta have options!  Lol…  Let’s start with a formal shot on the black background:

Nick

What a stud.

At this point we headed outside because we wanted to get some variety in Birmingham, but before we look at those let’s see some behind the scenes action – first with our 6 second Vine for your looping pleasure…

Now for your extended viewing if you like here are the replays of our live Periscope broadcasts from our day.  If you haven’t downloaded Periscope yet you can do so and follow us at @FrameableFaces at this link.

Okay now for the location photos…  Shades, sun, flowers, steps, casual pose – cool!

Nick

And more steps….but a totally different aesthetic….

Nick

And we’ll leave you with this one – we like cityscapes with brick, alleys and the like!

Nick

Another awesome spokesmodel and another awesome session!  We may still have some fun recaps coming about our Class of 2017 team, but even more exciting we’ll have new seniors to present soon – including a new round of posts featuring this awesome crew of 9 as they return for their own senior pictures!

The Great Gabby Makes Her Return With Her Senior Session!

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You know when the great Gabby makes her return you’ll be in for some, well…greatness!  Hehe…  But seriously – the fact of the matter is we have now photographed Gabby 4 times!  First as the little sister in her sister Rachel’s senior session a couple years back, as a spokesmodel for us for the class of 2016, again for the spokesmodel mural currently in our window and now for her senior session which we present highlights of to you now!

Great Gabby Makes Her Return…

We started out here in the studio and we kept it pretty simple.  Just the black and the white backgrounds.  We’ll share one on the black here…  just a great representation of Gabby being her cute smiley self:

Great Gabby Makes Her Return

From there we’re going to head to the location photos since that was more of the focus of this session, and for the outdoor shots we went to Heritage Park in Farmington Hills which has a ton of variety to work with…  Before we look at the photos though here’s our behind the scenes fun from our day – first with our 6 second Vine for your looping pleasure:

Next we have the replays of our Periscope broadcasts from the day – in this case we have the video without the comments scrolling on the screen but you’ll get the idea, and we love that Gabby’s mom Lisa makes an appearance and it’s really fun towards the end when the two sisters take over the broadcast for a few minutes!  You can download Periscope and follow us at @FrameableFaces at this link:

Now let’s get to the rest of the photos!

First we have this fun photo of Gabby on the back of a trailer – we used a tractor, a trailer…. we had a good laugh and this photo is awesome!

Great Gabby Makes Her Return

Next we have a close up and more thoughtful pose of Gabby and something about it just really shows off her beauty…

Great Gabby Makes Her Return

Lastly a pop of color from some nearby flowers help to make this photo a gem!

Great Gabby Makes Her Return

And there you have it!  We had a blast with Gabby and we hope you enjoyed the highlights of her session!

Ben Leads The Way for the Class of 2017 Spokesmodel Boys!

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Ben leads the way for the two guys we have in our class of 2017 spokesmodel crew!  Ben is another one of our daughter Lacey’s friends and Ben’s parents are friends of ours too.  Ben is sharp guy – smart and driven and we like him a lot!  He did a great job on this session which is cool because not all the boys dream of posing for pictures for a couple hours.  I think Ben had more fun than he expected which is usually how it goes!

Ben Leads…

After a string of 7 straight girls Ben is our first guy spokesmodel for this class and we started off with the GQ formal look here in the studio on the grey background…Ben LeadsDapper dude…

One more in the studio with a more casual look…

Ben LeadsAt this point before we head on location we’ll take a look at the fun behind the scenes footage from the day!  First we have our 6 second vine for your looping pleasure:

Next we have the replays of our live Periscope broadcasts from our YouTube channel.  You can subscribe to the channel and you can also download the Periscope app and follow us at @frameablefaces there at this link.  It’s fun!  Ben’s awesome mom Gina makes an appearance and so does Lacey as a guest host for a couple minutes!

Okay now let’s take a look at the location photos from the trails behind the West Bloomfield Library – it’s really nice back there…

Ben Leads

Definitely one of our favorite shots of the day!  Blue shirts bring out blue eyes nicely…

We’ll leave you with this last one by the city hall…

Ben Leads

Good stuff!  We had a great day with Ben and we’re happy for him to lead the way for the class of 2017!  Stay tuned – Nick is up next on the blog!  We hope you enjoyed these highlights of Ben!

 

A Little Bit Of Ilyssa & Lots Of Fab On Her Spokesmodel Session!

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Ilyssa has never been afraid to go after what she wants.  When she was three she decided that our Lacey should be her friend and she made it happen.  She brought our families together in doing so and we’ve been friends ever since – going on 14 years!  So this was another of those surreal sessions that we have with family or long time friends and it was quite fab indeed.  “Lissy’s” older sister Rachel was also a spokesmodel for us a few years ago so this is the second time around with these guys… but as a crew they’ve been in here every holiday season for their holiday cards so this was a familiar scene!

Ilyssa & Lots of Fab…

We started out in the studio on a day we weren’t so sure about – unseasonably cold and potential rain…  We broke out the damask pattern for the first shot and we love the hat – hats are way underrated for girls – they almost never fail!

Ilyssa

She looks amazing!

At this point we noticed that there was much more light coming in through the center court skylights than we thought – so we made the snap decision to go on location to Pontiac right then and there.  It was really cold but the lighting was pretty good and it was dry so we went with it…

Ilyssa

We spotted this doorway and combined with Lissy’s dress it was a total winner!  Love the blue on blue!!!

Before we show our last two sneak peeks let’s see our fun behind the scenes footage from our day!  First with our fun 6 second looping vine:

Next we have the replays of our Periscope broadcasts which are always fun from our YouTube channel.  Subscribe to us there and follow us on Periscope at @frameablefaces!  You can download the app at this link.

Okay let’s get back to a couple more sneak peeks!

Ilyssa had an outfit change on location and we got this cool shot on this staircase…

Ilyssa

Now if you remember we kinda raced out to the location when the weather appeared to break, but we still had some studio work to do, so back to the studio we went to wrap it up on the black background…

Ilyssa

Oh – hey beautiful!  Love the shades.

And that will do it for now!!!  A little bit of Ilyssa and a whole lot of fab!  We hope you enjoyed the highlights of our day!

 

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!

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!

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!

Doug’s Rant – Why Is Social Media “So Quiet”?

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So quiet

Why is social media so quiet lately?  It just doesn’t seem to me that there has been a lot going on.  Let me explain.  For a few solid years there it seemed like it was the “golden age” of major platforms – such as:

  • Facebook Pages switched over to “likes” from fans in April 2010 a month after we set up the Frameable Faces page.
  • Instagram launched on October 6th, 2010 and we joined it in May of 2012.
  • Pinterest launched in April of 2010
  • Snapchat launched in September of 2011 (more on that in a minute).
  • Google Plus pages for businesses launched in October of 2011 and they added Google My Business last June.
  • The major Twitter redesign launched in April 2011.
  • Vine launched in January of 2013 and at the time we had to wait until June for Android since T-Mobile didn’t have iPhones yet.

Since then……not a whole lot.

All of those platforms seem to still be thriving and growing as a general rule and it has now been two years by my count since a new “major” platform has made a splash.

Is a lull a good thing?

I can’t decide if I like the fact that it’s been a little quiet or not.  The thought of feeling like I have to manage additional platforms can be stressful especially if we are only adding more and not dropping any, but the rush of starting out on a new one is exciting and a lot of fun.  For example I was pretty excited about Pano Perfect which I thought might be the next big social photo sharing platform but that one has gone nowhere…  I hear people talking about Swipe and sure there are others.  We can debate all day about what a “major” platform is – I am not using any scientific criteria here…  I’m just ranting after all.  Feel free to jump in in the comments and add your two cents.  What do you think is the next big thing?  I want to know.

Meanwhile Snapchat is the one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.  Of the big ones I listed it’s the one that we don’t have an official Frameable Faces profile for, and after weighing it I don’t know if it’s right for us as a brand at least for the moment.

Edit*** – A Curve Ball

I wrote that last paragraph earlier today and one of our spokesmodels just happened to pop in to the studio and we were chatting about Snapchat since it was on my mind, and I think I just changed my mind again.  She showed me a couple things that convinced me that it could be a good platform for us.  For example I didn’t realize how it notifies you how many people have viewed your snapchat stories and which people viewed them.  So look for it – my wheels are turning now!

So as it turns out I have Snapchat to work on.  I started out wondering why it’s been so quiet in social media, but now that I’ve got another platform to play with I’m hoping things stay quiet for a bit!

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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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