Did you know today is the second annual Small Business Saturday?  We’ve got a great deal going on right now.  Stuck on gift ideas this holiday season?  If not for yourself consider giving the gift of photography to love ones this year!  Perfect for family, children, couples, engagements, anniversaries, high school seniors and just because/anytime portraits.  We’re slashing our lifestyle portrait sessions fee in half, but the sale only goes through 12/31/11!

Terms and Restrictions: Session must occur between January 1  – September 30, 2012 and it is the responsibility of the customer to schedule the portrait session.  If used for an engagement session the value of sale can not be applied to discount any wedding packages.  Newborn and baby sessions are not included in this special.  Sale is subject to WA state sales tax.

Hey guys!  I am truly touched by all the comment entries for the first ever Lifestyle Portrait session giveaway.  It was hard just giving only one free session away so I decided why not give away two?  Are you one of the lucky ones?  Sorry for the old school method of picking names out of a bowl, but here are the winners….

Congrats to the winners, Danelle and Dy.  I can’t wait to work with you and your families!  For those who didn’t win this time, no worries, I do plan on doing more giveaways in the future.

For my birthday this year I had one simple wish, I wanted to get 400 fans/likes on my Facebook Fan page by the end of the day on my birthday.  It reached 400 about two days after I made the announcement.  Well, to show my appreciation for everyone’s support I am giving away a FREE Lifestyle Portrait Session.  To find out how to enter for a chance to win, please scroll to the bottom of  this entry (after all the pictures from my low-key birthday bbq/celebration over the weekend with close friends, hehe).

Almost there!!

HOW TO WIN A FREE LIFESTYLE PORTRAIT SESSION

How to enter:

• You MUST leave a comment  on why you want to win with your name and email below in this blog post.
• You MUST be a fan on Facebook (yes, I will check).
• The contest runs from 7/26/11 –  7/31/11
• You’re not required to, but sharing is good karma and is a nice thing to do so please help spread the word

• You MUST redeem and schedule your portrait session by 12/31/11.  You can use the session for individual, families, children, couples, engagements, etc.  However, this free lifestyle portrait session cannot be redeemed or exchanged for any types of event coverage, boudoir or newborn baby sessions.
• You MUST be willing to travel to the Everett-Seattle-Tacoma area at your own expense for your portrait session if you’re not local.
• You MUST sign a model release form and be okay with me posting images from the portrait session online (website, blog, social media sites, etc).
• This free lifestyle portrait session cannot be transferred to another individual.

I’m very happy to announce that our website is finally LIVE!  It took many, many months for me to find a design that I liked.  The key was to keep things simple and clean.  You’d think with those criterias that it would be easy, but I’m such a perfectionist (and sometimes indecisive) that the process took a very long time.  Along the way I’ve debated over a complete customized website vs. a customizable template .  I figure what I was envisioning was simple enough that something custom didn’t make too much financial sense for my wallet.  Luckily, I found what I was looking for at ITDR.  I’ve been to their website many times before, but hesitation kept settling in.  What finally sold me into ITDR was their use of progressive enhanced technology.  Don’t you hate it when you try to go to a website on your mobile device and you get the “flash player needed to view this website” message?  Well, all of ITDR’s templates are mobile device ready.  Their flash sites are also search engine optimized.  I also love the back-end design and functionality.  Everything is amazingly easy to work with.  I’m so happy with the decision I made to move forward with an ITDR site.  So happy that I also went ahead today to give our blog a face-lift as well to compliment the new website.  Since I’m already using WordPress as my blogging platform it took literally less than 5 minutes to set up.  So easy!  So happy!  Enjoy! =)

Hoooorray!  We received our very first flushmount wedding album last week.  Unfortunately, we had to give it up a few days later to our clients to whom the album belongs to.  That just means we’ll need to order a sample for ourselves very soon because I miss the album already!  It’s a good thing I snapped a couple of pictures to share.  Ronelda + Dexter’s wedding album was massive!  It’s a 10×10 leather album and we’re talking about 25 spreads (50 pages) thick.  Although I forgot to weigh the album to confirm, the packaging slip said it was 10.5 lbs.  That’s heavy.  Anyway, the client decided to go with the classic black leather cover which felt so nice and soft. Much, much softer than it looks…

You have the option to imprint on the spine or the front cover in four available colors.  Silver is shown here.

Thick archival pages.

The album pages lay flat when open.

Flushmount means that each image spread is printed and then mounted to an archival page/board.  This allows for us to custom design each page layout.  Our layout design is aimed at two thing:  clean and simple.  We believe in a design that will be timeless.  Trendy, special effects and fancy layouts will appear cool now, but will it stand the test of time?  Trendy always goes out of style.  Ten or Fifteen years from now will it still be cool or just plain tacky?  Something to keep in mind =).

There are two options for binding 1) panoramic or 2) split.  Panoramic means there’s no gutter at the spine while split means there’s a gutter.  This album is an example of panoramic binding.  Panoramic binding allows more design flexibility and you don’t lose any part of the image to the gutter.

Each page is printed on Kodak’s Supra Endura photo luster paper with UV coating.  There’s also Kodak’s Metallic Endura paper with a linen texture option.

As you can see the spine is very well constructed.  As we mentioned earlier, this album is 25 spreads (50 pages) thick.  We recommend no more than 20 spreads.

Of course we had to slap our name onto the back cover =).

As part of your wedding day investment, we strongly suggest taking one of these high quality photographic albums into consideration to re-tell your wedding day for years and years to come.  After all that’s been said and done a wedding album that captures your story will be one of your most precious keepsake.  We’re proud to offer the flushmount albums in three different sizes: 8×8, 10×10 (recommended) and 12×12.  In addition to the options mentioned above there are over forty cover materials to choose from as well as cameo options that can be built into the album cover.  We hope to get a couple more samples in from Forbeyon, our choice for album print & bind, to showcase the different album options that are available.  After much research and finally seeing their album samples at the WPPI Seattle Roadshow this past August we were very impressed with their album products!  We look forward to working more with this company.