Capturing your everyday.

I used to be a professional photographer.  And I own all the fancy camera stuff I should own to shoot weddings and senior pictures and family groups.  But I got tired of eating wedding cake every Saturday all summer long and sometimes Friday night too.  Because let's be honest…..after three wedding cakes in May they all taste the same the rest of the summer.  And the hours I would spend all week between weddings editing photos got tedious and when you stop loving it you have to stop doing it because people deserve to have wedding photographers who live to take wedding pictures.

So now I take pictures just for me.  And a lot of them.  It's one of my favorite hobbies; to see people and beaches, and food, and pretty things through a lens helps me focus on the best parts that the world I live in has to offer.  I'm also a firm believer that you don't need all the fancy gear to take good pictures.  You need practice, some general knowledge of sound photo composition, and some creativity.  Case in point--my IG feed is my favorite body of work.  Body of work--can I use that ostentatious term for something also categorized as a "feed"?  I think so.

Here are some of my favorites from 2013:

MAC Russian Red deserved its own picture.  It dries your lips out like a day in Antarctica….but it looks good while doing so.

Georgia actually took this picture while we were on a school field trip.  She did an amazing job I think…..getting all the important elements of the photo in the picture, it's not blurry, and she's just so proud of it. She'd never have been able to do this with my huge Canon.

Some questions I get a lot about Instagram:

Favorite apps?  

PicFx hands down. Myfavorite filter is PFX5.  I use it almost 100% of the time to get a softness in my pictures that makes everyones skin look flawless and colors pop.

Beautiful Mess is great for adding words to pictures and they have some unique fonts.  Their filter Poppy is also a good one.

There are lots of other fantastic ones that I use here and there but those two are my go-to's.

Do you ever take your pictures in Instagram? 

Hardly ever.  I usually take them with the camera on my phone, save them to my camera roll and then upload them to Instagram once I edit them. It's a lot simpler than it sounds and doesn't take any time.  I also will e-mail myself pictures taken with my Canon DSLR and save them to my camera roll for editing.

Best companies for printing Instagram prints?

Single Prints:  Foxgram--You can get a few sizes of square prints and they're super cheap and delivered as fast as Jimmy Johns.  Prinstagram and Persnickety Prints are also nice sites for printing a variety of sizes. Origrami  is a good deal on packs of prints and the box they send your prints in is prize enough!

Posters, Calendars, Other Products:  Canvas Pop prints amazing IG photos onto Canvases and they're always on sale.  Prinstagram prints incredible posters and desktop calendars.  Sticky Gram creates magnets out of IG prints and they're adorable as well as iPhone and iPad covers.  Blurb will take all your IG prints and put them into a gorgeous glossy book.

And there's a lot more out there--these are just my most favorites and I've used them all so I can vouch for the quality and ease of use for each company.  If you don't use IG but have access to it I'd really encourage you to make 2014 the year that you start.

It's such a personal and fun and easy, easy way to capture everyday moments that are here……..and then gone.