We took an epic road trip through the American West in May/June – just Ally, Doug, Lacey and Tony in a Ford Escape.
15 days, 13 states, 9 National Parks, national forests, visits with friends in multiple cities, 3 homes of United States presidents…. whew. It was AWESOME.
Ally doesn’t always bring her camera on our trips but she did on this one and took some landscape photos – a change of pace for her with the greatest outdoor subjects imaginable! America’s National Parks!
Landscape Photos In the National Parks Of The American West!
Now keep in mind she didn’t document the entire trip – we highly recommend you check out the companion piece to this post at Doug’s History blog at his M10 Social website for the entire story, tons of commentary, videos, tips and recommendations for your own roadtrip (you should definitely do it). Doug is a very good amateur iPhoneographer and we did a lot of hiking on this trip and Ally wasn’t about to take her bulky camera on strenuous hikes. But the photos Ally did take? Well….
Prairie Dogs at Badlands National Park
How awesome are those Prairie Dogs????? Roberts Prairie Dog Town at Badlands National Park is amazing. There are prairie dogs in several different locations at the Badlands but this one area is the “town” where you can just sit and watch them for as long as you like. It’s a totally natural habitat – just because they call it a “town” doesn’t mean they have an exhibit like at the zoo or anything – this is the real deal. And it’s not like you have to get lucky to see them – there are tons of them although you definitely have to get extremely lucky to get THREE of them to POSE like this crew, and Ally did! She just has that touch lol….
Here’s another photo from the Badlands…
Badlands National Park
Here’s a view of Mt. Rushmore.
Mt. Rushmore
The next several photos are from Yellowstone National Park with its wondrous thermal basins and wildlife…
Yellowstone National Park
Bison at Yellowstone
We saw bison everywhere at both Badlands and Yellowstone!
A furry friend at Yellowstone National Park
Obviously seeing a chipmunk isn’t unique to National Parks but we couldn’t resist this little furball having a snack.
Yellowstone National Park
Yellowstone Lake is really spectacular and we came across this elk hanging out too…
Yellowstone National Park
Love that photo.
Last one from Yellowstone – the Grand Prismatic Spring!
Yellowstone National Park
Here are a couple from the next day at Grand Teton National Park which borders Yellowstone to the South.
Grand Teton National Park
Such a majestic place….
Grand Teton National Park
Here’s one from the south rim of the Grand Canyon (the north rim opened just a few days after we were there).
Grand Canyon National Park
We also made a stop at Horseshoe Bend later on the same day we hit the Grand Canyon:
Horseshoe Bend
The next several photos we’ll leave you with are from 4 of the “Utah Mighty Five” but we did indeed get to all five of them!
Bryce Canyon National Park
Bryce Canyon National Park
Capitol Reef National Park
Arches National Park
Arches National Park
Arches National Park
A trip of a lifetime and we cannot wait to get back out there….
We hope you enjoyed these highlights from out west!
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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!
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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Join the Frameable Faces Community – sign up for our email newsletter for the best of the week in the Frameable Faces World! Click here!
Get the Doug&Ally Morning Show PODCAST at the following links!!!
We took the show on the road for the Frameable Faces Spring Tour 2017 and it was an amazing odyssey through the deep South of America! The trip took us over 4000 miles through seven states, three Civil War Battlefields, two college football stadiums, encounters with alligators, sharks, deer, roosters, tortoises, salamanders, and various other wildlife, two photo sessions, friends, family, and a whole lot more…!
The Frameable Faces Spring Tour 2017!
Our basic route!
We Periscoped, Tweeted, Snapchatted, and photographed our way around this amazing country and we loved it. So let’s recap in order – hope you enjoy reliving the tour with us!
Here’s where it all starts – we were so excited…. hehe.
A rocky start…
Day 1 was brutal. We wanted to leave at 3 and didn’t get on the road until 4:30. Okay fine – that’s not unusual, but it took us TWO hours to get to the Ohio border which should only take an hour. There was awful traffic and the weather was horrible, in fact it poured sheets of rain almost the whole way to Chattanooga with major thunderstorms. So I white knuckled it with my eyes burning doing about 50 MPH most of the way and we didn’t get in until 3:30AM. Ugh. But even though Ally, Lacey and I (not Tony) have switched to a plant-based diet we suspended that for our traditional first meal at Skyline Chili along the way…
5-Way Chili!!!
We got a slow start the next day obviously, and we made it down to Gainesville, FL the second night to stay with our friend Cathy Hackl and her family – we’ve known Cathy almost 2 years now from Periscope and we’ve hung out together in Northern Michigan, California and Florida – we did family portraits for her before and those highlights are here on the blog.
Here’s the first Periscope broadcast of the trip just checking in with our peeps from the road in Georgia on the way to Gainesville – Ally handled the broadcast while I kept focused on the road… If you don’t have Periscope yet you can download it and follow us at @frameablefaces at this link.
We had a nice visit and Cathy took us over to the University of Florida campus the next morning to check out the campus and “The Swamp” – their football stadium which was pretty cool. We Periscoped from the stadium as well!
From there we headed down to Delray Beach on Saturday where my parents stay for the winter and we had a couple of great days down there with them, but not before a quick stop in Kissimmee to see Scott and Kristi – aka @FloridaPlunge on Periscope. Check out their website FLORIDAPLUNGE.com!
Scott & Kristi – @FloridaPlunge!
In Delray Beach we visited with cousins and friends, got a little sunburned on the beach (ouch) and took a little drive over to Alligator Alley on I-75 to look for gators which we did the last time we were down there too… This time we only saw a few in the first few minutes of the Periscope we did…
Wednesday Morning we woke up and got on the road down to see my old college teammate Steve and his wife Amy, their daughter Jamie, and their various pets…. The drive alone down to the Keys is spectacular and we Periscoped part of it once again with Ally manning the iPhone and me doing the driving!
We stopped along the way in Tavernier to grab a key lime pie at the Blonde Giraffe – best key lime pie in the Keys! We snapchatted the pie (which as a side note you can see at the end of this post).
Once we arrived at Steve’s house we settled in for a couple days of eating stone crab claws, lobster, cobia, and barrel fish – so delicious…. We were also happy to see Peanut – Steve’s pet tortoise…. He was tiny last time we saw him – maybe the size of a basketball. He’s grown quite a bit…
Steve helping Tony feed peanut in 2005
Here’s a short clip of when Peanut walked over to say hello (he actually scared the crap out of me a few minutes before this)…
Here’s an extended Periscope replay of Peanut chowing down on some salad.
We went back down to Key West on Friday morning for a snorkel adventure where we saw a 5 foot nurse shark!!! I bought a waterproof case for my iPhone but found it way too difficult to manage especially with an iPhone 7 because of the “taptic engine” button that wouldn’t work through the plastic… so I have no photos underwater. But that’s okay – it was amazing. We saw plenty of ocean life including a huge grouper, colorful coral and plenty of other fish at the reef in addition to the shark.
After more key lime pie (on a stick) at Kermit’s we headed back to Steve’s for a brief hangout and group shot before we said goodbye…
To Pensacola…
The drive up to Pensacola from Delray Beach is a haul… but we got up early and arrived in the late afternoon for a photo session with our friend Nelma, her husband Alfie and their sweet little one Lydia! We’ll save that Periscope for the separate blog post of her sneak peeks but in the meantime here’s a couple tidbits – a panorama I grabbed with my iPhone of Ally photographing them in Plaza Ferdinand VII (more on that below in the snap story)….
….and here is a little behind the scenes collage we posted on Instagram.
We stayed with our cousins Daria and David in Pensacola and the following morning (Sunday) we drove first to Mobile to visit a certain Sock friend of ours….
Definitely one of the most fun Periscopes we’ve ever done! We had a great visit with Jason and Amanda (Sock Cop hangs out with them from time to time… lol)!
On to Biloxi…
From there we drove to Biloxi, MS to do a photo session with another friend we met through Periscope – Lana and her (now) hubby Chase! You can see the sneak peeks and read all about that at this link, and in the meantime here is the behind the scenes collage we posted from that session on Instagram…
We stuck around for an extra day in Pensacola and celebrated Passover with our cousins so with the extra time we went over to the Gulf Islands National Seashore where the beaches are gorgeous and where you can take a walk through Fort Pickens which the Union controlled throughout the Civil War.
White sands….
I think this panorama that I took of Fort Pickens is pretty cool….
Starting the long trek home…
We headed out on Tuesday morning towards Mississippi bound for Hattiesburg and Vicksburg. We made a stop at Southern Miss University to visit our friends the Hopsons – Jay is the head coach for the Golden Eagles and we hadn’t seen them since his 2 years coaching the linebackers at Michigan. We had been through Hattiesburg once before on a road trip, the campus is really nice and their stadium “The Rock” is very cool.
From there we raced to Vicksburg National Military Park to check out the battlefield before it got too late…..and it was kinda too late – to drive the park anyway. But we were able to walk a few miles of it and it is really impressive.
Vicksburg Great Redoubt
Michigan Monument at Vicksburg
From there we drove all the way up the Mississippi Delta on Highway 61 to Memphis where we spent the night. If you ever make that drive from Vicksburg MAKE SURE you have gas…. there are zero gas stations for about an hour. Heck there’s almost zero civilization for about an hour…
After a yummy breakfast at Staks Pancake Kitchen with one of Lacey’s friends in Memphis the next morning we made the final leg of the drive back to home sweet home but not without a stop first at Parker’s Crossroads Battlefield in Tennessee….
Hallowed Ground of the Parkers Crossroads Battlefield
….and a stop to visit with one of our favorite seniors of all time Kim (who was also an intern for us) in Nashville where she has been working since finishing her undergraduate studies at Vanderbilt!
And with one more stop to visit another one of Lacey’s friends in Louisville, we headed all the way back home. Home sweet home, in our own beds, exhausted and fulfilled by our Spring Tour 2017 – an incredible odyssey through a large swath of the USA that we’ll never forget!!! We hoped you enjoyed the recap and we’ll leave you with the entire snap story from the trip – additional photos and fun with all the geofilters intact!
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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!
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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Join the Frameable Faces Community – sign up for our email newsletter for the best of the week in the Frameable Faces World! Click here!
Biloxi Bride has a nice ring to it and we love Lana – we have for a while even before we met her in person! We met Lana through Periscope, a live streaming app owned by Twitter that we’ve been broadcasting on since 2015. To say that this app changed our lives would be an understatement and these photos are further proof – heck we’ve blogged about it enough that if you’ve been following us at all over the last couple years you know this already…
Meanwhile when we first saw the handle of @thelittlemilfmaid pop up on the app we had to chuckle a little. And it turned out to be Lana – a gorgeous little fireball with a cute little boy and a fascinating life as a dancer in New Orleans with plenty of tales of her own on the app. We connected with her and became fast friends, and she even shipped us some delicious chicory coffee from NOLA – YUM! She had been saying for a while that she wanted to have us take pictures of her someday and we thought that would be so much fun to do! Well the opportunity finally presented itself…
Here’s one to start with of the happy couple!
Awwww so sweet!
The Frameable Faces Spring Tour 2017!
We had been talking about taking a road trip during spring break to see family and friends, and we knew that not only did we have some friends we met through Periscope along the way, but that some of them had been saying for some time that they would love to do a photo session with us if only we were closer! We put the word out that we were coming South and Lana along with our friend Nelma in Pensacola (blog post coming soon) both said “we’re in” for photos! The Frameable Faces Spring Tour 2017 started to take shape (blog post coming on that too). We had it all planned out to do an afternoon session in Biloxi with Lana and her fiancé Chase who are also expecting! Lana was around 6 months pregnant for this shoot and you would barely know it. They are going to be a perfect blended fam – Chase has kids of his own, and Lana’s little guy Channing and her mom Angela (both of whom we also know from Periscope) actually came by to hang out on the session and we had so much fun. What’s cool about Periscope is 9 times out of 10 when someone is broadcasting live you get to see who they really are – it’s not usually super rehearsed and Lana is no exception – she’s cray cray in the very best way way – a true delight!
Meanwhile here is the behind the scenes broadcast we did live on – you guessed it – Periscope. You can download the app and join in the fun on our future broadcasts at @FrameableFaces here or you can also check them out from twitter here.
As you can see in the broadcast we did some photographing at the Hurricane Katrina Memorial – a sobering spot marked by a beautiful mural. Biloxi was hit extremely hard by the hurricane and the resiliency of the community was on display everywhere you looked – we were impressed with the cool little coastal city. Here’s one of our resulting photos at that spot:
Love that pose!
Chase meanwhile is a bit of a jack of all trades – he repairs iPhones and is an MMA fighter, so don’t mess with him. Hehe…
We moved around town for a few shots and finished at a park close to the Biloxi lighthouse for these last two:
Biloxi Bride
We should also mention a fun little footnote…. these were originally planned as engagement photos, but these two decided to change gears and get married less than a week after our session! So they’re already married!!! Lana has already been a Biloxi Bride and the next photo is a perfect happily ever after to finish on!
So there you have it – a Biloxi Bride and her beau with a baby on the way! We hope you enjoyed our first ever photo session in Mississippi with this wonderful couple!
Equipment used:
These are our affiliate links to the products we used on this session:
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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!
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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Join the Frameable Faces Community – sign up for our email newsletter for the best of the week in the Frameable Faces World! Click here!
Summit Live as I discussed in part 1 the other day was a truly special and amazing experience, and so much so that there was no way I could tell the whole story in one blog post. So let’s continue on with the rest of the event shall we? We only got through the first day in the last post but we’ll try to wrap up the rest here.
A-Paneling We Go…
On day two Ally had the honor of moderating the photography panel which included @TerryLWhite (The Adobe Master), @EricNeitzel (The Journalistic Photo Genius), Aaron Roth from @Arkon_Mounts (The Equipment Guru), and @jennamtphoto (The Underwater Portrait Innovator). Here is the replay of the broadcast from our YouTube channel! Note: These broadcasts were originally embedded from Katch.me which no longer exists. The replays we had to replace them with do not contain the comments and unfortunately the first one below was corrupted during the upload from Katch…
It’s a bummer we don’t have this one available because Ally did a pretty darn good job!
Afterwards we fired up another broadcast with a bunch of Peri-friends in the lobby / vendor area and we’ll list a few of them for you and where they appear:
@Skorstar (Caroline Lesley) and her husband @JonErlichman appear right at the beginning. We’ve known them on Periscope for a while now and they are fantastic. Caroline is the creator of the @PeriscopePuppet and it’s the most hilarious thing – her mouth does this weird thing when she talks as the puppet which you never see during puppet broadcasts… Jon has been doing tech trivia for a long time which is always a blast and the two of them along with Seth Cohen are the co-creators of the first Periscope network @ParachuteTV1 which we have been on before and as of this writing we will be returning on Tuesday 1/26/16 with a show called “The Photo Shop” which we are excited about!
@mojojojonez appears around the 1:58 mark – Amanda is a sweetie and we just met her on Periscope not more than a month or two ago.
@KyleKittleson shows up right after at about the 2:05 mark and at that point I got roped into what I’m pretty sure was my first chorus line ever…. Ally became a pretty big Kyle fan over the weekend to the point where I had to tell him I was sick of hearing about him… hehe
@eguerra019 shows up at the 4 minute mark – Ed, or “E”, is an entrepreneur from Mexico and he has told us he may be making a trip to our neck of the woods here in Detroit on business soon!
At the 6 minute mark Ally reveals that she dropped her iPhone in the toilet and she shows off her 7-11 temporary special $12 phone… ugh.
At the 7:30 mark we got “King Cake mobbed” in our scope – I guess a king cake is a cake from New Orleans – hadn’t heard of that but we totally respect the mob game just for the record.
@WickFury makes an appearance at 8:30 – what a good guy and a talented guy too. The first scope we saw of his I think was an awesome stencil art scope he did several months back. Seems he was providing the security for the event!
@Ryan_A_Bell appears to make a few more funny faces at about 10:15 – he’s really good at that. Hehe…
After the day’s events we headed over to a local bar called John Colins for a little get together with the team from Periscope where we met Kayvon Beykpour the co-founder and CEO – what a nice and humble guy. Here’s a photo of us along with Jason Cooper (Sock Cop himself next to me) and his wife Amanda. The girl to Kayvon’s right I think is another member of the Periscope team but alas I’m not 100% sure…. I’ll update this if someone can let me know!
Summit Live Gets Live At Night
Later that night @TheRealJuanJohn had a table set up where he was doing drawings and he did a graffiti version of our “FF” Frameable Faces avatar which I scoped – check it out in this 5 minute replay. Pretty cool!
Day 3 of Summit Live
We woke up to a happy text from @CathyHackl asking if we wanted to grab breakfast. The third day was the day of our small business panel which we were really excited about, and one of our good Peri-friends the stunningly beautiful @BeBonita Viviane Aires came up to our room to do Ally’s makeup for the day! So Cathy and I walked over to The Grove around the corner to grab a bite and I brought breakfast back to the room for Ally.
Doug and Cathy at The Grove!
When we got back Viviane and Ally had already started. Viviane is a makeup artist and beauty scoper based in Philadelphia. She’s awesome and I scoped a bit of her doing Ally’s makeup:
At this point we were ready to rock our panel! We were really pleased that we had a packed room and “Chocolate Johnny” Kapos was the moderator – he did a superb job and there was a lot of talent and knowledge at that table as we were joined by Victoria Taylor (@VictoriaTaylUK – her social media company is called Blend Social), Jana Francis (@Jana_Steals – she is the founder of steals.com), and Sam Martin (@Socially_Sam of sociallysam.com).
Ally and I got to share our philosophy of live streaming for a small business and how to build community around your brand. We discussed how we broadcast together and are both on board together with our strategy as a mom and pop shop. We talked about how you can get direct business from Periscope which should only grow, how to enhance the experience for your clients through Periscope broadcasts, and the importance of viewing this as a long game since we are just starting to enter the early adoption phase of live streaming – 2015 was really the early innovator stage. Joel Comm discussed this in his keynote speech as you can see below:
Joel Comm
Meanwhile this was a dream of ours since we first attended Imaging USA in Nashville exactly 6 years before Summit Live and we were barely a year into building Frameable Faces together as a team. We thought then that one day we would be the ones presenting to big groups about the things we’ve learned building a business. 6 years later and there we were!
Check out the replay of our panel discussion:
Note that @iSocialFanz Brian Fanzo makes his own appearance at the very end of the scope – one of the co-hosts of Summit Live and one of the more knowledgable guys in the community when it comes to all of the different live streaming platforms and social media in general.
Bring On The Puppets
Later in the day the one and only Sock Cop (@JasonBurglar / Jason Cooper) appeared in the lobby and was “doin’ the things” with everyone. Jason himself and his wife Amanda are such a lovely couple from Alabama, and I truly believe that Jason is a comic genius. I mean that. We’ve featured Sock Cop on this blog before for his “senior portraits” haha… It was hilarious when Sock Cop showed up at Summit – check it out:
After the day’s events we joined a bunch of the scopers of @ParachuteTV1 at a cool place (with amazing lamb burgers) called The Press Club.
L to R: Rosie & Jason Stolken, Jon Erlichman & Caroline Lesley and us
Not to be outdone by Sock Cop I was able to get an exclusive scope later that night back at the hotel with none other than the @PeriscopePuppet!!! This broadcast has some amazing and even some awkward moments when the puppet was rubbing his eyeball on my face…
Wow…. lol!
Goodbye San Fran…
We didn’t really scope on the fourth day, but the following day we scoped from the back seat of our Lyft ride to breakfast on our way to the airport, happily exhausted and buzzing from an incredible Summit Live! We hope to be able to attend future gatherings like this with our friends, and we continue to look forward to every day when we can hang out with everyone virtually through the magic of Periscope!
Here are a couple Instagram collages I posted of a bunch of photos of us and our friends from the weekend, and this about sums it up. It was all about the people. The community. The extremely awesome community. To quote @The_Sarah_Moore “we found our people at Summit Live ’16”. Until next time, Periscoping down.
LOVE
More Love
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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!
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?
**********************************************
Join the Frameable Faces Community – sign up for our email newsletter for the best of the week in the Frameable Faces World! Click here!
Summit Live was an incredible experience. Yes it was. Just simple truth. It is hard to describe unless you were there what it was like, but I’ll just say that the first night I had a moment where I looked around and was just really overwhelmed. One of those feelings that will stay with you for a long long time, and I swear I’m not just being dramatic. It was such a special feeling to be a part of such a great community with people you have been enjoying spending time with, learning from, laughing with, and admiring virtually for months, and then suddenly you’re hugging them one by one….by one, by one, by one, by one – one favorite to the next to the next. Your head starts to spin and you start to feel this buzz and you know this is a really special moment in your life. It might sound a little ridiculous but that’s the truth. At least for me it is and I’m not embarrassed to say it. I’m pretty sure Ally felt the same way.
Let’s Let The Broadcasts Tell The Story…
We started out pretty early with a flight that connected in Chicago where we did a quick shortened version of our morning show from the airport. We were so hyped! Note: these replays do not contain the comments that were made in the broadcasts… when we posted this originally they were embedded from Katch.me and that website no longer exists. These are the raw feeds that we now have on our YouTube channel.
Arriving at the Park Central!
When we finally arrived in San Francisco and walked up to the front entrance of the Park Central Hotel we had our first surreal moment as a crew of our people came flooding out the door right at that moment for hugs all around!
We still needed to check in and we had a few hours before the festivities so we went off on our own for a while. San Francisco is amazing and Ally had never been there. I had been there once a little over 22 years ago and was eager to get back. We started out at the Ferry Building and hung out on our own where we ate at The Slanted Door and sampled some ice cream from Humphry Slocombe and some toffee from GL Alfieri – both delicious.
From there we walked to North Beach to meet up with my old college buddy Jeff Meisel for a cup of coffee at Réveille Coffee Co. before we headed back to the Park Central Hotel to start the party…
Frisco Frameables Selfie Time…
Summit LIVE!!!
Once we went down to the opening party that’s when that overwhelming moment happened that I was referring to earlier… and at that point I had to start scoping. I have gone through and listed the people who appear in the broadcast at what time marker in case there is anyone you would like to see:
@YoPickless appears at the 4:53 mark. LOVE this girl – she was handing out #Yopickles #PassTheTat tattoos and she is beautiful in person!
@BenLeonard appears at about the 8:33 mark. What a nice guy he is! Pretty much everyone was really cool.
@CathyHackl at 9:40 – one of our closest friends in the community and she is expecting their third child! You’ve seen her and her family appear on this blog here. Love her!
@VictoriaTaylUK at about 12:10 – Vikki was on the small business panel with us and what a sweetheart. We actually first met her on another live streaming app called Blab. She’s great! Had a lot of fun with her.
@KatieLance and @TigerwonNYC appear at 12:46. Katie is my favorite social media “guru” on Periscope – her blog is awesome and I always learn something new from her. She really knows her stuff. Tiger we had met before at a meetup in NYC last summer and she interviewed me later on during Summit Live.
@TerryLWhite shows up at around 14:20. He was on the photography panel that Ally moderated and he actually used to have a photography studio in Troy not far from our studio. He’s currently based in Atlanta and he’s an Adobe expert. Good guy!
@RyanSteinolfson aka “Periscope Ryan” appears right after Terry at around the 15 minute mark. A digital marketer based in San Diego, I felt a little bad that my Wolverines destroyed his Gators in the Citrus Bowl – okay maybe not that bad, but we hung out and talked shop quite a bit over the 4 days we were there. What a great dude.
@JelCruz at 16:33 – this is funny – one of those whose name you’ve seen but don’t recognize right away in person! What a sweetie! Got to hang with her a little bit during summit.
@EthanPariseau shows up right around the 20 minute mark – we “hang out” with Ethan often on our morning show. Good guy from the state to the south – Ohio…
@KristianCotta pops in right after that around 20:14 – personal trainer, social media consultant and Washington State alum who is still bitter about the 1998 Rose Bowl… (hahaha). Had a great time with this guy!
@MarissaDunlap shows up at the 22 minute mark and of course Ally and I had to “sing her into” the scope as we do on our regular scopes. Marissa lives not far from San Fran and she can sing some mean opera.
@ChrisStrub at the 22:50 mark is known for just completing an intense trek of volunteering with youth organizations in all 50 states! What a bad ass.
@AECJosh is one of the three creators of @TheEditorTV which is a network on Periscope that we’ve been on a few times and he shows up at the 24:26 mark. He was there with his lovely wife @TheCraftyCutie
@JoisyGirl555 – Lulu appears at 24:50. We met her in NYC at our summer meetup last year and she’s a riot. It was great to see her again!
@ChocolateJohnny appears at about the 27 minute mark. Owner of Perfection Chocolates in Sydney, Australia, he moderated our small business panel and did a fantastic job. As a small business owner like us we have connected and have been bouncing ideas off of each other for months. He brought us some chocolate and it was fantastic!
At around 30 minutes we met a couple of really nice guys whose names I can’t remember as of this writing!!! Dangit…. if someone lets me know I’ll update this post!
@JasonStolken and his beautiful wife @RosieStolken appear at 32:42. We’ve talked on the phone before but had not met until this moment. Great couple and we got to spend a decent amount of time with them. One of the best, funny and genuinely good guys in the community. He even gave the classic “high face” in my broadcast! Haha!
@KeiphMaurice is the creator of www.playforstuff.com which is a network of game shows across Periscope where you can play for prizes and our Play For Stuff show should be debuting next week! Keith makes his appearance at 37:58.
@MrASingh is an artist and a really deep thinker – he does a lot of inspirational philosophical scopes from the UK and he appears at 38:50. I of course had to do a little British accent trolling on Amrit when I saw him…
@DaveGonz2012 I met at the 40:30 mark – don’t actually know Dave very well but a nice guy and Ally and Dave had an opportunity later to talk a little photography.
@EricNeitzel at about the 41:20 mark is an awesome guy. He was on the photography panel as well and we have been Peri-friends with Eric for a while. He has used his photography to help document and provide information from choppers during wildfires among many other things.
@SandyChoiRadio at the 42 minute mark is definitely one of my favorite scopers. I’ve spent a lot of time late night just hanging with Sandy on her scopes listening to her freestyle, play guitar, sing, rant, and whatever else she feels like. The girl is fearless and will say whatever is on her mind. She keeps it real and we were so glad we got to spend a lot of time with her on this trip.
@DieterDieterVB at the 42:40 mark – what a sweetheart of a guy. A photography enthusiast, Ally was able to help him out with a couple of tips and we were happy we were able to hang with him as well.
Mr. @Ryan_A_Bell himself – the creator of the Periscope Community Summit and one of our most notorious trolls – creator of the @FlammableFeces account appears at about the 43:30 minute mark. All joking aside he’s been a big supporter of ours and it was great to meet him in person.
@AfricaMiranda gave one of the most inspiring talks you’ll hear as one of the keynote speakers at summit. A beauty inside and out and a very talented and accomplished girl – we’ve been fans of hers for a while and she appears at the 44:45 mark.
Whew….. okay. Here are a couple fun iPhone photos from that first night…
Doug & Ally with @LynnRose!
Doug & Ally with @JennyQ and @MsCandyBlog
With Courtney Harvey (next to Ally) and Africa Miranda (far right)
We spent a lot of time with @LynnRose (wonderful actress and singer), @JennyQ – Jennifer Quinn who is a host of The Daily Q on Blab.IM, and @MsCandyBlog – one of the most entertaining people on Periscope with her amazing candy review shows, throughout those 4 days – love each one of them! We also loved meeting @CourtTheTrendLA – Courtney Harvey who is an E! News producer and host of The Trend LA, and of course Africa Miranda as we mentioned before!
Okay that will do it for now – the next post we will get into the panels we participated in as well as meeting more friends including Sock Cop and the Periscope Puppet…. stay tuned!!!!
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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!
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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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.
Afterwards it was time to get over to Insomnia Cookies for a little dessert – YUM!
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.
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!
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!
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:
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…
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:
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!
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:
And a few more shots…
The 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.
So there you have it – some fun photos by Ally in Alligator Alley! We hope you enjoyed these! See ya later gators!!!
And so the campus tour rolled along… this time into Ann Arbor to see a couple of our favorite Frameable Wolverines! The cold front was just moving in and the weather was bitter cold but we didn’t let that stop the fun……or the FOOD! Shocking we know…. 🙂
The Frameable Faces Campus Tour checks in at Pizza House!
Nicole and Cheyenne met us at Pizza House – one of the most popular spots on campus and home of the best chipatis you’ll find anywhere. A chipati is a yummy salad wrapped in yummy and warm chipati bread served with chipati sauce. The pizza and garlic bread rocks as well – actually pretty much everything is good at Pizza House… It was a historic MLK day with this year marking the 50th anniversary of the “I Have A Dream” speech and it was also inauguration day. The girls didn’t have classes and we were able to relax and catch up for a couple hours in the late afternoon for an early dinner.
Chicago style deep dish pizza and a chipati! Mmmmm....
Ally and a couple of her favorite Frameable Wolverines!
Doug with Nicole and Cheyenne
In keeping with the theme established in East Lansing, we took a stroll over to Insomnia Cookies for dessert… and we can only say that it’s a good thing there isn’t one of these in West Bloomfield. It’s dangerous enough with a Just Baked right across the street from the studio (YUM), but late night cookie delivery could be a big problem. 🙂
Yet again at Insomnia Cookies.... So goood...
Another fun trip with two of our Frameables who are also responsible for two of our greatest images ever – Nicole standing in the water with the beautiful orange sunset many of you have seen and the stunning image of Cheyenne printed on the big beautiful plexiglass which still hangs in the studio. We love our Frameable Seniors and we love to share in their successes as they enjoy their college experience!
We have been saying for a long time that it would be fun to visit our seniors when they go away to college, so this year we launched the first annual Frameable Faces Campus Tour! We started out with a trip to East Lansing to visit our Frameable Spartans, and we had a great time!
Frameables at "El Az"!
As usual this get together centered around food. We arrived on campus and picked up Lainie, Jessica, and Chelsea at their apartments/dorms and headed over to El Azteco which is a Mexican dining favorite at Michigan State for the famous Topopo Salad. We had lots of laughs and it was great to catch up! If you enjoy a good salad and you haven’t had one of these you are missing out….
Two Topopos! Yum!
Ally with some of her favorite Frameable Spartans!
Doug with Jessica, Chelsea and Lainie
We then walked a few blocks over to Insomnia Cookies – one of the best concepts ever. Cookies served warm and even delivered until 2:45 AM – wish we would have had this when we were in college….
The Insomnia Cookies didn't last long...
Each one of these girls were responsible for some our best “iconic” shots of all time – Lainie actually IN the water with a dress on, Jessica in the snow in a white dress, and Chelsea on the pink background on a huge canvas that hung in our studio for a long time. Three of our all time favorites! All in all it was a great night and we hope to do this every year! Next stop, Ann Arbor….!
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:
The 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.
So there you have it – some fun photos by Ally in Alligator Alley! We hope you enjoyed these! See ya later gators!!!
