Well it’s now week 10 of Sydney lockdown and I’ve been completely unable to do what I love - take photos! Well, I could take photos of my own family but with hubby hooked on Zoom for 10 hours a day and three teenagers home-schooling in their trackies, they aren’t exactly keen to pose for me.
But, I have been able to work on some personal photo projects which I never have time for otherwise and I’ve got some hints and tips for your own treasure-trove of digital imagery.
My first suggestion, actually, I really insist, is to print your photos! I reckon just on your phone there is going to tens of thousands of images, plus the ones you’ve posted on Facebook and Instagram AND the ones your brother shared from last Christmas on WhatsApp! All that digital goodness is just hiding in there, waiting to be enjoyed.
There are lots of great photo printing options from albums to canvas, acrylic blocks, gift cards, calendars, even keyrings and coffee cups for gifts.
I designed three beautiful linen-covered albums for our family, showcasing the very best times of the little lives of my two youngest daughters, aged 13 and 16, and a ‘best of sisters’ album of my very favourite images of my girls together. These were printed with the professional arm of Momento. They are an Australian company and produce absolutely beautiful albums and stationery. These bespoke babies will be treasured forever. They were an investment but the paper stock and binding are next-level gorgeous. In fact, shhhh, don’t tell my Mum, but I have ordered a copy of the Sisters one for her and Dad to enjoy their grandaughters at home.
For a fabulous North Shore local retail option run by a great team, I can’t recommend Pixels Plus highly enough. Alex, Susan and Vicky are an awesome bunch and they have a great online ordering system as well as a shopfront to provide support and advice. I particularly recommend their canvas products but they also do albums, high-quality prints with accurate colours and lots of gifts. The team are great with advice on whether an image will reproduce well and they also provide scanning of negatives and slides if you are really going to delve into a historical photo project! You can find them on Willoughby Road in Crows Nest, when you are allowed to leave the house (although they are doing click & collect for any online orders).
Now, onto all those social media posts? What if Facebook just suddenly didn’t exist anymore and all your years of posts and photos and moments and love just disappeared? And what if Instagram swallowed all your perfectly curated imagery? Allow me to introduce ChatBooks. This is a family-run American company with a mission to ‘strengthen families’. Cool huh? A few years ago, I went crazy and popped my social media feeds into ChatBooks for them to produce about 15 photobooks. It was so easy peasy and the books are really cute and super affordable. They come as 6” x 6” square books and are customisable. The quality is great and they make a great stack on the coffee table to flick through over a coffee or laugh at with the kids. Definitely worth checking out and so easy, you can do it while chilling on the couch, watching Netflix and drinking wine!
What about something for the wall? I LOVE a good gallery display and we had an awesome one in our hallway for years …. until I decided it needed overhauling at the start of lockdown and now it is still bare!
Gallery displays like this allow you to feature a whole bunch of images rather than a single hero shot that really needs to be high-quality, super-sharp and a big enough file size to reproduce well. You can see from my collection here that it was holiday shots, happy moments, great portraits and group shots, none of them particularly award-winning shots, but definitely images that defined good times for our family.
You can find lots of inspiration on Pinterest on how to arrange frames in an organic way that still makes sense. These kinds of displays are great for hallways and staircases and allow you to keep growing and updating the images as your family grows.
EBay has loads of suppliers of light, simple frames in white and black in sets of 20 or more in varying sizes, usually a few 4” x 6”, some 5” x 7” and some larger options to mix it up. They can be easily attached to the wall using 3M velcro stickers and the best tip to getting them right on the wall is to cut out the frame sizes in newspaper and arrange them on the wall first, moving them around until you’re happy!
One final supplier that I’ve used and love is Wondermade. These fabric wall stickers are a fantastic option if you want something on the wall but want the flexibility to move it around as your mood changes or if you are renting and not able to put art on your walls. You can upload your own images for production and they also have a great range of quotes and affirmations you could add into your display for some fun. My favourites are the photo dots that come in 15cm, 20cm, 30cm, 40 and 50cm sizes with sets available also. Great for a series of images of the kids, like this display of my daughter, Evie, below:
Don’t hesitate to give me a call if you want some advice on photo book design, canvas printing, gallery walls or anything. If I can’t actually DO photography, I’m still in my happy place if I can talk about it!