We love springtime seniors! The majority of seniors take their pictures with us throughout the summer and fall but we always get a handful after the winter is over, and when the trees are just starting to bloom it makes for some great scenery! With Joshua we had good weather too and his mom Gail joined us for some fantastic photos on this senior session junket with Joshua!
First an experiment in the Studio…
Before we share the location shots we actually started in the studio, and Ally has been playing with her lighting, so with our big soft box on the other side of the studio she positioned Joshua in front of it for a high key white background instead of our usual white vinyl backdrop and we got this result – pretty cool!
Here’s a little behind the scenes snippet from this experiment from Facebook Live – check it out!
Now let’s catch up with our location day…
Springtime Senior Session Junket
We stayed in and around West Bloomfield where there are plenty of awesome spots like this one that we call “the slab”.
Just chillin’
The other thing that’s cool about Spring seniors is they usually know exactly where they’re going in the Fall. Sometimes they do in the previous Fall but sometimes they don’t yet… For Joshua he’s going BLUE and wearing Maize!
For the last photo Joshua put on a pink shirt which always makes Ally happy – Ally loves the guys in pink and we have more behind the scenes fun here on the Intagram Live replay from our YouTube channel:
And here is the result!
Good looking dude!
And there you have it – our senior session junket with Josh! We hope you enjoyed the highlights of our day with him!
Equipment used:
These are our affiliate links to the products we used on this session:
BECOME A PATRON! Subscribe at our Patreon page for tips, tutorials, podcasts and even individual coaching on your photography or social media!
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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We are in awe of Audrey! We were certainly awed by her on her spokesmodel session – what a cool human. We actually have so much in common with this family it’s scary… They’ve rescued a bunch of cats – so did we and we still have a couple of them. Audrey’s dad is in a band. So is Doug. They don’t eat meat. We don’t either…. It just seemed like the planets aligned for us to meet them and Audrey’s mom Michelle is as cool as Audrey – the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Audrey herself is a sharp cookie with personality to burn – we gotta say we think we really recruited well for this year’s spokesmodel crew!!! With Audrey we are also extra excited because she’s our very FIRST Troy Athens Redhawk!!!
Awed By Audrey
So Audrey came ready to roll on a day where the weather forecast kept changing. It was supposed to be a total rainout, and then it wasn’t, but then it did rain, but then it stopped….. sheesh. We were prepared to just go all studio but as you’ll see we did make it outside in the end. We’ll start with the studio though on the black background with the black couch which is a look we love – especially with Audrey’s contrasting blonde hair:
Love that one!
Next we broke out our grey fabric for the first time with this class of 2019 spokesmodel crew. We have two greys – the paper and the fabric and we like both a lot. We also did a little behind the scenes livestreaming for this part on Facebook Live – take a look by clicking on the video below!
And here is one of the grey background results…
Stunning.
Dodging the Downpour
Just before Audrey and Michelle arrived at the studio it was pouring outside – we can hear it from the roof above our studio when it comes down hard. We thought we weren’t going outdoors at all. But then it stopped and the forecast was showing only “cloudy” with 5%-15% chance of rain the rest of the day. So we went out. Right when we got to our location it started raining again and we decided to wait it out for a little bit as we saw our opportunity slipping away…. we were in two cars and we had a group text going…
Hehe….
But lo and behold just when we were about to call it a day the rain stopped! We sprung into action and got a couple more gems – we even got in another livestream on Instagram!
Here’s our fun behind the scenes Instagram Live which skips a little because the signal wasn’t great…
We’ll leave you with one more from outside – we were happy to get these because Spring is finally arriving and there’s a little color out there now….
And there you have it! We were certainly Awed by Audrey – we can’t wait to get her in front of Ally’s camera again for her senior pictures!
Equipment used:
These are our affiliate links to the products we used on this session:
BECOME A PATRON! Subscribe at our Patreon page for tips, tutorials, podcasts and even individual coaching on your photography or social media!
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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We are so thrilled with Paige – we totally connected on her senior spokesmodel session and she is just one of our peeps. That’s it. She just is – she totally fits in and we feel like we’ve known her forever. Her mom Maxine? Same way. We just had so much fun, and so Paige is definitely FRONT PAIGE NEWS for our studio as far as we’re concerned and she is representing Frankel Jewish Academy for the senior class of 2019!
Front Paige News
It’s always funny with the spokesmodel sessions when Ally says to me beforehand “okay I don’t want to go too crazy today” because we don’t need a ton of photos for these sessions in order to get some images out into the scene for the upcoming senior class, and yet that’s often what happens. Very often we just fall in love with our spokesmodel crew and Ally can’t help herself – this session with Paige was a marathon and we probably would have been happy to go longer! We started in the studio so we could get a few photos on our red paper and the silver metal setups. First the red with the full length:
Beautiful!
Next we brought out the silver metal… and we started a Facebook Livestream with Facebook Creator for some behind the scenes fun! Click on it and check it out!
And here is one of the results…
Heading Out
At this point we headed outdoors to get a few photos on location and first we returned to an old graffiti wall we haven’t been to in quite some time… this yielded a real winner! LOVE this one:
We made one more stop over by the West Bloomfield Library for a few and we did a little Instagram livestream for some more behind the scenes fun – take a look from our YouTube channel!
And we’ll leave you with this last one outside…
Beautiful with the backlight and the off camera flash! Definitely front PAIGE news indeed, and we hope you enjoyed the highlights of our awesome day with her!
Equipment used:
These are our affiliate links to the products we used on this session:
BECOME A PATRON! Subscribe at our Patreon page for tips, tutorials, podcasts and even individual coaching on your photography or social media!
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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What can we say about Tori and the hands of fate that were all over this story from how and when we found her all the way to the epic spokesmodel session with her and her mom Lora in the YAK! The “yak” would be Pontiac which is where Tori was born hehe… Let’s just say we already have multiple inside jokes and stories from our short time knowing each other – we just seemed to fit from the first minute.
It all started with Tori’s mom Lora walking into the studio and asking about senior pictures really early in the game for the class of 2019 at the urging of another senior mom we love while we were (and kinda still are) in recruiting mode for our new crew. When she told us her daughter went to West Bloomfield Ally and I looked at each other right away and both our wheels were turning… Next thing you know we had Lora and Tori come for a little pow wow and we knew immediately we wanted her on our team! The rest is his-TORI!!! See what I did there? Let’s see how many ways I can work Tori’s name into this blog post lol…
A Vic-TORI-ous Session
We decided on Pontiac as I mentioned earlier on a fairly chilly day and even with some technical difficulties with Ally’s new off camera flash we still pulled off a handful of outstanding photos! Let’s get to a few…
How adorable is she? Let’s also give a shout out here to Yasmeen at The Beauty Lounge for Tori’s makeup and Natalie at Mandy Rose Studio for Tori’s hair!
Let’s also take a look at the hilarious behind the scenes Facebook Live – we LOVE this girl…. haha!
One more photo outdoors before we move to the next phase…
Love. Great style on Tori here and we are pretty pleased with the lighting (when it worked)! That’s the nice thing about spokesmodel sessions – they are a great opportunity to try out new spots, new equipment and new techniques, and while Ally was a little frustrated fighting with the equipment we do love the results!
At this point we headed over to the Flagstar Strand Theatre which you should check out for a show if you get a chance – what a gem of a venue in downtown Pontiac and special thanks goes to them for the access. They set us up in the dressing room where we decided on a whim to get a few really fun shots of the star backstage like this one!
We played around in the theatre and got some cool stuff but the lighting and the angles we tried were a bit challenging. We’ll go back and try again at some point – you can get a sense of what we were doing in this fun Instagram Live we did from inside…
A couple of behind the scenes shots like the pano I grabbed and the shot Lora took below are pretty cool too – they give you an idea of what we were trying to do even if the finished images weren’t quite ready for prime time…
Now we’ll head outside for one more photo which could be our fave of the day with Tori in a cute winter hat…
Just love that one!!! Gorgeous girl.
And that’s a great way to end it for now – we are thrilled to have Tori representing our studio and we cannot wait to get her in front of Ally’s camera again! We hope you enjoyed the highlights of our day!
Equipment used:
These are our affiliate links to the products we used on this session:
BECOME A PATRON! Subscribe at our Patreon page for the Doug & Ally Morning Show Podcast, tips, tutorials, and even individual coaching on your photography or social media!
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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Ellory came to the studio this week with her mom Jodi for some good vibes, her modeling closeup and some fun! We definitely got all three. What a sharp and adorable girl she is and we really had a blast so let’s take a look at some highlights!
Ellory Was Ready For Good Vibes
We photographed the whole session on the black backdrop but with a few different styles and we’ll start with some Good Vibes right off the bat!
The laughing photo is a fun one to set the stage – this girl couldn’t keep the SERIOUS pose for too long without just a little giggling.
We also have some fun behind the scenes first from Facebook Live:
And now let’s change up a couple of styles! We broke out the fan for some of that “black and blowy” glam!
Ellory is such a rock star!
We also have some fun behind the scenes on this too but for whatever reason I’ve been struggling with the audio and covering the mic when we go live on Instagram. No idea why…. we’ve been livestreaming on Periscope and other platforms for 3 years with no problem but for some reason we’re a little snake bitten on Instagram. BUT – in this case it’s kind of funny…. if you watch at the 48 second mark I ask Ellory what she wants to do with her life and her reaction is priceless. First I played around with her acting shocked that she didn’t know, and then I let her off the hook telling her I didn’t know until less than 10 years ago. It’s pretty cute.
Let’s also give a shout out to Valoria at The Beauty Lounge for Ellory’s hair – that’s Valoria making an appearance in the livestream too.
Now let’s wrap it up with a couple more photos! This next one is really nice – Ellory is wearing her mom’s dress here!
And one more – a fun close up from above:
Totes Adorbs!!!
And there you have it – you can see we had so much fun with this little whirlwind of cuteness and we hope you enjoyed the highlights!
Equipment used:
These are our affiliate links to the products we used on this session:
BECOME A PATRON! Subscribe at our Patreon page for tips, tutorials, podcasts and even individual coaching on your photography or social media!
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!
Morgan has been on the radar here for a while – usually we’re the ones out recruiting seniors to be our spokesmodels, but this time it was Morgan who recruited us! You could say that she skated right into our zone, shot and scored, and we’re pretty happy that she did! In all seriousness, we couldn’t have known that the U.S. Women’s Hockey team would make the type of splash that they did with the gold medal shootout in this year’s Olympics in PyeongChang in such dramatic fashion when we started talking to Morgan, but now that it happened and it has brought women’s hockey into the spotlight more than ever we are even more excited to work with Morgan. She and her mom Jodi brought so much energy (not to mention cupcakes) to the studio and Morgan personifies everything that is great about these athletes – a sweetheart who can go cute, glam, playful, and pretty but is also dead serious about her hockey and can kick your ass. We definitely scored a hat trick with spokesmodel Morgan.
A Photographic Hat Trick With Spokesmodel Morgan!
So in this case we’ve got the brains, brawn and beauty hat trick, and we’ll start with the brawn/beauty combo before we go to just beauty – as for the brains you’ll just have to take our word for it!
How cool!!! We can’t look at this photo without being reminded of last year’s spokesmodel kickoff with another bad ass beauty you may remember – Olivia! This time Morgan combining the black and blowy setup with the sports theme gave us a killer result!
We also have some behind the scenes fun as usual – first with our Instagram Livestream that we have posted on our YouTube channel – take a look (and we apologize for some of the audio trouble on this one – seems like user error as yours truly may have been covering the mic with a finger or thumb….)!
Moving right along let’s take a look at a couple more outfits and backdrops starting with the Def Leppard rocker chick look! And why not – Photograph is the best rock song about photography ever isn’t it? You can actually read about that right here on this blog in this piece I wrote back in 2013 about the top 10 songs about photography, but I digress…. Check out this rockin’ shot of Morgan…
Got a photograph!!! Picture of!!!
Now let’s go to a change of pace, and style as we move over to the purple and this super cute outfit:
Pretty in Purple!
We have one more behind the scenes livestream too – this time on Facebook Live and this was a fun family affair with many of Morgan’s crew chiming in on the live broadcast – including some hilarious trolling from her little brother. Hehe… As a side note this was our very first Facebook Creator livestream that includes the fancy shmancy intro and outro! Check it out!
We’ll leave you now with one more photo from the brown backdrop with this fun and playful close up of our girl:
Awesome and adorable.
And there you have it – a hat trick indeed and we hope you enjoyed the highlights of our day with Morgan! The class of 2019 is off to a fantastic start!
Equipment used:
These are our affiliate links to the products we used on this session:
BECOME A PATRON! Subscribe at our Patreon page for tips, tutorials, podcasts and even individual coaching on your photography or social media!
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!
What a way to kickoff the class of 2019 – with a little “Ally on Alli crime”! And if producing stunning images of this girl is a crime then lock us up and throw away the key!!! Alli was here in front of Ally’s camera years ago when she was a pre-teen but now she’s going to be a senior and this is the class that our own Tony is in too so there will be many surreal moments like this one over the coming months. Alli’s delightful mom Risa joined us in the studio (and even a grandma and a grandpa and an aunt popped in for visits) and it was a bit surreal for her too!
Ally Photographs Alli
Each year we go into the new spokesmodel sessions with some new ideas and techniques for the upcoming season and this year we are focusing on playing around with our lighting. It may not be something you’ll notice per se but we shifted around our soft boxes a little and got a lot accomplished, and Alli looked fantastic. She’s a pro – so great to work with, and so these images are quite awesome and we’re excited to get them out there. We have our typical 4 sneak peeks for you here!
We’ll start with the damask background and we love the way this one turned out!
Just stunning…
We also have our behind the scenes fun as usual – this year we have been playing around with some Facebook options as well as going live on Instagram. First let’s have a look at our Facebook Live broadcast of the making of the photo above:
Next we have this tight crop on the red fabric – Ally is a fan of the hands-framing-the-face. Not all of our seniors choose to do this type of pose but we love it here for Alli!
We moved next to the white vinyl background – loving this next look with the ripped jeans! We also need to give a shout out to Mandy Rose Studio for Ally’s hair and makeup – they did a fantastic job!
Adorable!
We also recorded our Instagram Livestream and uploaded it to our YouTube channel – take a look and please subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss future vids!
At this point we moved to the black backdrop and we’ll show off one of those images before we wrap this one up…
Love the smile! Love this girl!
And there you have it!!! We are off and running with the new crew for the class of 2019 and Alli led the way in style!!! Be sure to follow along for more upcoming sessions – all the links are below and don’t forget to sign up for the weekly newsletter!
Equipment used:
These are our affiliate links to the products we used on this session:
BECOME A PATRON! Subscribe at our Patreon page for tips, tutorials, podcasts and even individual coaching on your photography or social media!
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!
So much has been going on in the social media world this past week (Periscope Monetizes) or so – or at least it seems this way for us. I’ve got a few topics to cover with a few tips and of course a couple of observations and opinions….
Let’s get to it, starting with the major headlines for this post…
YouTube Gets LIVE
We had heard about YouTube livestreaming for a while but weren’t sure if it would be on our radar anytime soon. The rollout seemed somewhat shrouded in mystery as this article from techcrunch.com pointed out last month… But at this point we can tell you that it’s available to verified accounts with at least 100 subscribers, so at the urging of our wonderful Periscope friend Sonam (who loves YouTube Live) we gave it a shot with no warning or announcement… Here’s the result:
We had a lot of fun and we had people there! There were people we knew and new people we didn’t from shares during the broadcast. We picked up three new subscribers during the broadcast and we got this little report at the end:
Observations from a veteran livestreamer but not a YouTube expert:
The comments are a little delayed (time from when a viewer comments to the time you see it and respond) but the delay got better over the course of the broadcast
You can block a viewer or put one in “time out” for 5 minutes if you’re being trolled
Viewers are only allowed to comment so many times – there’s a limit on comments (apparently there is a monetization model that allows you to override this once you get to 1000 subscribers)
The comments do not show on the playback so be aware of this if you are creating a video that you want to stand on its own after you finish. Keep in mind that you can edit, tag, select a thumbnail – all the things that you can do with all other YouTube videos you upload. We are putting our livestreams there into a separate playlist.
Oh – and the filters!!! You’ll see them above if you watch but here’s a sampling…
Ally likes the bubbles – I think they’d be cooler if you could pop them… lol
Taaaaaaake Onnnnnnnn Meeeeeeeee……! Hehe…
Paranormal Activity anyone….?
Vintage grainy black and white…
And of course…. the dance party / disco ball effect…..
Awesome moves (if we do say so ourselves lol), lots of possibilities, wheels are turning here at Frameable Faces.
A couple more YouTube tips while we’re at it:
If you want to get to 100 subscribers so you can go live (once you’ve had your page verified) you should make sure people are able to see whom you’ve subscribed to so they can follow you back if they are so inclined – otherwise they won’t even know you subscribed:
Make Sure That Third Box Is Unchecked!
One more thing: Be sure once you do hit 100 subscribers that you claim a custom / vanity URL for your channel! http://youtube.com/frameablefaces/ looks way better and consistent with our other profiles than some random gibberish.
Periscope Monetizes
Periscope announced an update that brings monetization to the game for scopers and for the app! I won’t lay out ALL the details here, but suffice it to say we generally see this as a good thing overall. Are there questions about what effect this may have on content creation on the app and whether the introduction of money will “infect” the community somehow? Yeah I suppose. But this just came out two days ago and you can now purchase coins to use to give three levels of “super hearts” to a broadcaster during a livestream there. We’ve already jumped in giving and receiving. Here’s a screen shot from our broadcast yesterday:
You can see the message from Periscope that our friend @redefiningrich1 whom we call “Suzi Q” gave us a “super heart” and you can actually see that the super heart is extra sparkly to the right. As a side note – the compliment to Ally on the screen is a funny auto response from the “Eggbot” from eggdrp.com. There are three levels of super hearts – they increase in value and animation effect on the screen. They then are tallied as “stars” and once you receive 185,000 total super hearts / stars you can apply with Periscope to be a super scoper of sorts and get payouts on the hearts monetarily. I know, it’s a little confusing but it does make sense after a bit.
A couple quick thoughts on Periscope Super Hearts:
Our stance on this has always been that if people want to donate or tip we would accept it if Periscope made that an option on the app. We aren’t going to call a ton of attention to it and we certainly aren’t going to make anyone feel like we require it or expect them to do it in order to be in our broadcasts or a part of our community. We do certainly appreciate it and we don’t take it lightly that people find value in what we do on our broadcasts.
One major flaw we see in the rollout of Super Hearts is that not everyone receiving them will reach 185,000 stars anytime soon, and even those who do aren’t guaranteed to be approved to receive any payout, so people may be purchasing the coins to donate the super hearts to scopers who may never be able to redeem them. Periscope will get that money. Now I want Periscope to make money – I’m fine with that – the platform should make money. Could you make the case that there is nothing wrong with the app making money by being available to bring you the specific content you like and donate to? Well yeah, but without the scoper getting a piece and without you knowing if the scoper will ever get a piece? I don’t know…. I think they should address this somehow.
To be continued…..
A Couple Of Thoughts on other platforms while we’re at it…
LinkedIn has legs….
Another platform I’ve spent more time on in the last year or so than ever before is LinkedIn. I’m no expert there either but one thing I’m noticing is that posts there can have an extended life that I don’t see on some of the others. I’m finding that a good random post continues to get discovered for weeks on LinkedIn if it’s getting likes. I posted a good one two weeks ago that has been getting steady likes and views and it even seems to be picking up pace. That doesn’t happen on Facebook or Twitter. At least not without shares or retweets. I suppose it happens on Twitter on a popular tweet with a relevant hashtag and enough activity (maybe even on Instagram to a lesser degree with hashtags). But I think the difference here is that the post seems to be getting discovered in feeds without any hashtags. The activity and the views seem to be keeping it afloat so to speak. I don’t know a ton about LinkedIn algorithms but I think this example is noteworthy. Same thing when you write an article on LinkedIn – I’ve had articles picked up by LinkedIn Pulse that get views for over a year to the point where I went in and updated them so they were still accurate because people were still reading them.
As for the recent post that is getting views from a couple weeks ago…
25 likes is more than I normally get and it’s been a steady rate of 1-2 per day for two weeks now, and 2310 views is a lot for me for a random post. It clearly crossed some threshold – there haven’t been any shares and I only have 778 followers there. Meanwhile – take the advice in the post PLEASE! The Bitmoji I used is a full “Bye Felicia” even though it’s cutoff above. Haha…
Here’s a little further breakdown of who is seeing the post from the analytics:
Views from all over the country – various level employees and various companies. Pretty cool!
A Little Annoyed With Snapchat… But Geofilters Still Rock
Maybe we’re an exception in this case but as a small biz that mainly consists of Ally and me, it made sense to link my Bitmoji to our Snapchat profile. I man the Snapchat so once in a while I could add my Bitmoji to a snap, or use it in chats with our connections and our high school seniors – it’s fun! Even better, I could screen grab dual bitmojis of me and Ally from the chat and we’ve had a blast with those. Take this instagram for example with Ally and I flying in huge paper airplane! Lol…
But here’s the problem and the recent decision by Snapchat which I find to be absolutely ridiculous… They changed everyone’s profile pic in their snapcode to their default Bitmoji if it’s linked with NO OPTION to use anything else. Like so:
Now before you start with the wisecracks, I don’t WANT to be the face of Frameable Faces. I don’t even usually like both Ally and me to to be the faces of Frameable Faces! I usually like the logo for our avatars – or at least a photo of both of us like this:
I’m not the only one who is mad about this…. nothing like taking away personalization from all of your users eh? Doesn’t seem to be the smart move when you’re locked in a battle for survival with a hostile Instagram.
On a positive Snapchat note, geofilters still rock for small brands. Here is one of our senior spokesmodels Lauren using one we placed at her high school on the last day of school:
Random Twitter thoughts:
Why would you pay someone to show you how to get “15,000 new twitter followers” who has 2387 themselves? You wouldn’t. Why would you want “15,000 new twitter followers”? You wouldn’t. Make connections people – not just numbers. This garbage and this approach by many so-called “gurus” is prevalent…
Wait a sec – What About Facebook…?
Wait! No tips or ranting on or about Facebook in this post? WHAT? That’s weird…. well that’s okay I guess.
Oh wait yes – I almost forgot just a little thing I picked up that you may know already, but when you upload a native video to Facebook (which is a good idea for better presentation and reach on Facebook as opposed to a link to a YouTube video) you should consider offering captioning – like the closed captioning you see on TV. Some people may catch a video in their FB feed without clicking on it and pulling the audio. They can still follow a bit with the captioning which is pretty slick and easy to implement on Facebook. Here’s a screen shot for one I added the captioning to for our client Mark Mandell, Attorney At Law (the link is to his YouTube page by the way – please subscribe if you’re interested).
Note the text at the bottom that has been pulled right from the audio by Facebook. It’s pretty spot on but you can edit any words that are incorrect.
You can find the option to add captions in the “edit video” menu shown below – you just click the “Generate” button under the “Captions” tab to get started:
Thoughts?
That’s all for now. What are your thoughts? Do you have tips of your own? I hope you enjoyed this – I want your feedback – please share and comment!
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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!
Yes. Photography blows. We should know better than anybody – we’re photographers. Through extensive research we have compiled the 21 reasons why photography is completely overrated.
21 Reasons Photography Is Completely Overrated
You’re ugly and no one wants to see photos of you (shots fired! okay you’re not really ugly – this is an intentionally silly list)
Your friends are ugly and no one wants to see photos of them either
It costs a lot of money to actually get a good photo taken – like by an actual pro
Good cameras are like way too expensive and hard to use
Smartphone cameras can be a pain in the butt to figure out and even harder to use effectively than actual cameras
That one time you looked really fat in that photo that was posted on Facebook
You have all these photos with your ex that you never want to look at again
Actual memories are better and you can kinda change them in your head to make them even a little better than they are – it’s harder to change a picture
Because like, leave me alone
Smiling makes your face sore
Your dad is annoying – always wanting to take a picture of you
Your dad is even more annoying thinking selfies make him cool
Your dad is yet even more annoying doing snapchat selfies with half of his face cut off because he knows “it’s a thing”
Exhibit A – Reason #13
Your mom is annoying for all of the three previous reasons even if slightly less annoying than your dad
Instagram overposters
Having to explain……..like, anything
Okay an example of #16 – You told someone you didn’t feel like going out but then got photographed…….out
Narcissists aren’t cool in general and photography gives them an outlet to be….narcissists.
Storage / Syncing struggles
The awkward moment where someone is trying to imply that they want to take a picture of the rest of the group who have something in common that you don’t really have with them. I mean, it makes sense but still totally awkward.
Lists like this
So there you go – 21 reasons photography is completely overrated! Feel free to add more to the list….
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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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Yes it’s been a while since I’ve posted a rant! Let’s do this….
Twitter Stickers
You may have seen Twitter’s recent announcement about the new “stickers” feature which allows you to add emojis and other things to your photos. Fortune points out the obvious play on Twitter’s part to keep up with Snapchat with a headline that gives the new feature a positive spin. Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal is completely and inexplicably oblivious to the chasing of snapchat with a slightly-less-than-flattering headline about Twitter…. Note in particular the second paragraph in the WSJ article about the other “communication” apps with stickers. C’mon…. Really? ZERO mention of Snapchat there? That’s amazing. I’m not totally sure how I feel about stickers yet since I haven’t used them but I have plenty of thoughts and you can look at this from a few different perspectives which we’ll get to.
A Couple Thoughts On Social Photography…
Meanwhile as photographers the ongoing debate of whether iPhone pics and the ease of entry is “ruining” the industry is an interesting one to us. This article on Popular Photography while not overtly addressing the big picture in that regard seems to come from that mindset, claiming that using Twitter stickers is a way to “completely ruin your photos”. I always find these types of opinions a little troubling. We’ve always embraced the idea that the more people appreciate everyday photography the more they will appreciate professional photography. We’ve always looked at Snapchat and Instagram as opportunities to have fun just like everyone else and we actually use them to highlight aspects of what we do at Frameable Faces. To call attention to stickers being a way to ruin pictures is silly to me. If you take a picture you don’t want to ruin with a sticker, then DON’T ADD A STICKER…… duh. Right? Maybe the fun you can have with stickers can help you build community to draw people in to see the stuff that is meant to stand on its own without the stickers. We actually covered this topic today on our photography show “The Photo Shop” on @ParachuteTV1 on Periscope if you’re interested in taking a look.
Social Media Apps chasing Other Social Media Apps…
So while the photography studio owner in me doesn’t have a problem with stickers, the social media guy in me might. Here’s what bugs me a little about them – keep in mind that I have not used them yet. This is an overall statement about social media platforms that I think applies here, even though I may be admitting soon that stickers are the greatest thing to happen to twitter (although I doubt it). I have no problem admitting when I’m wrong…
Here’s my issue. Each time a unique social media platform adds a feature to chase and become like another platform, it blurs the lines between platforms that make them cool. I like the different uses for each platform. I like the different etiquette and the different cultures of the different apps. Here are three other examples I thought were somewhere between silly and annoying when they rolled out and still do:
Facebook hashtags Good try Facebook but you are NOT twitter. Hashtags totally flopped on Facebook – they just really don’t belong there in my opinion.
Instagram video I believe Instagram did this as a reaction to Vine at the time. I can’t stand videos on Instagram. There was nothing “insta” about pausing while scrolling though the pics in the feed to watch a 15 second video and now the videos can be up to 60 seconds – good grief. I know not everyone agrees with me on this but it is my rant…
Periscope sketch Rolling out the ability to sketch on the screen while you’re broadcasting was, well…sketchy. I can only conclude that this was a way to chase Snapchat (?) even though the two are completely apples and oranges. Sonia Figueroa is the only scoper I’ve seen who consistently makes me smile when she draws hearts on the screen to “give them back” to her viewers (she’s one of my faves), but at a time when everyone was waiting for other more practical features this was a bit of an annoyance.
So there it is… had to do it. Thoughts? Are you using Twitter stickers? Can you think of other app fails from apps chasing apps? Please comment, share your thoughts, and share this post!
Love that one!
Beautiful with the backlight and the off camera flash! Definitely front PAIGE news indeed, and we hope you enjoyed the highlights of our awesome day with her!
Random Twitter thoughts:
