Decorating your home with family portraits

Decorating your home with family portraits can be much more than putting an 8×10 or a few 5x7s on a bookshelf or side table.   Many Ann Arbor area follks tend to choose those smaller images to display in their homes… and over time have lots of cameo sized pictures spread around the house. It is spring,  you may want to give your family portrait decoration a spring lift.  What follows is a suggestion to tune-up  your existing family portrait decoration.

Gather all ye little family pictures…

I often suggest this to portrait clients:  Gather all those little framed family pictures together and display them together.  A grouping of photos–even tiny 5×7′s– hang with much more prominence when arranged in one single wall.  Small frames are easy to  inexpensively replace,  transforming your ‘rag-tag’ into ‘eclectic’.

[While many plain bare walls are crying for decoration that is not the subject of this article. However at Photo Generations we have added a special service for those looking to decorate their walls with fresh new family portraits.   Our new family portrait decoration service is more precise--'pre-envisioned' as Ansel Adms might say --than the method described below, because we use it before you make your family portrait decisions--but that is a subject for later...]

It is a lot of fun to look at the group of family pictures

It is a lot of fun to look at the group of family pictures on your wall and see the differences a few years makes in how everyone looks.  Your ‘cameo gallery’ of portraits means more when you can access all the images in one place–So much more of a statement than an image here and there scattered in various rooms.

Once you pull your cameo family portrait gallery together from the existing pictures in the house, you will be amazed how great they look together!

Creating a ‘cameo gallery’

First:  choose the wall.  It may be on the staircase heading to the basement, the upstairs hallway, the family room, the media room.

Next: design the gallery.  An basic method to design your cameo gallery is to layout your frames on the floor.  Arrange them in a pleasing manner.   You may prefer a perfect grid–you may like an assymetrical grouping.   Or, if you like to doodle, first draw a sketch of the wall and the little pictures.  Or, cut out colored squares for each picture and arrange them on your wall sketch till it looks good to you.

A grouping of smaller 5×7 pictures works so much better than the same pictures on different walls-even in the room.  The reason is this:  the grouping creates a focal point.  Your eyes will be drawn to that focal point because it is the most interesting thing on the wall in a room.  A group of even tiny pictures becomes, from a distance, a single focal point.

Tools to make hanging your portrait easier for small family portraits in small frames

An easy hanger is a ‘wall grabber’ type wall hook that will hold small and lightweight frames.   They are one piece metal pieces you gently knock into the wall, they stay put on modern walls very well.   On white walls they are nearly invisible.

If you have one of those fancy laser beam levelers, use it!.  You want to determine the outside reference points of your wall grouping.  The top (or sides) of  frame groupings makes sense to sight, rather than the actual wall hanger.  Use a light pencil mark and mark your wall.

You will want to know where the hanger on the back of each picture is, because it seems they are never exactly the same.  Test hang  your frame to see where the wall hook has to be in order to align the frame where you want it.

As you hang your pictures, knock just one hanger into the wall at a time, then hang the picture that goes on it right away, then move on to the next picture that hopefully you have laidout on a nearby floor.  This one-at-a-time method lets  you custom fine tune– how high or low to put the wall hook–depending on where the hook on the back of the picture is.  Generally it looks best if the tops of frames in your grouping are aligned in your pattern.  Not all frames need to be precisely arranged,  just having a few key frames precisely aligned goes a long way to creating a pleasing layout.

No mystery to decorating with portraits

The great thing about grouping your older smaller images into one presentation, is this: You have more room for new family art!

I know, because I have gone through the process  described above with our family pictures.  And over the years I have gravitated to larger sized family portraits and whimsical child portraits.  One beautiful portrait is so much more powerful (and has more decorating use) in a room!  But that is a discussion for another day!

Meanwhile let’s enjoy this beautiful spring weather in Dexter, Ann Arbor and all over Washtenaw county. H ey why not create a new child or family portrait to decorate our walls with!

Ready for a night out for a great cause? Saturday March 13, The Dexter Ed Foundation is havng its annual fundraiser auctioning off lots of fun and valuable items. Money funds mini grants to teacher projects. So come on out to downtown Dexter North Point restaurant at 6 pm. The silent auction starts at 6:30 pm the live auction starts at 9 pm. You just might get lucky & win the bid for a gift portrait session, for Class of 2011 or Baby’ First Year in Portraits, or a family portrait session and wall print, or a business photography session–perhaps for your own website. Make the leap, before the clocks spring forward!

happiest family portraits place to  live:  ann arbor?

Would the Ann Arbor area rank high in a national poll of ‘happiest places to live’?  Over coffee this am, looking over a slide show pictures of ‘ happiest cities poll’   I strongly felt ‘yes!   The random poll asked about physical health, healthy behaviors, emotional health  & work experience .  I thought: the Ann Arbor area has to rank high- after all-I see it all the time in the family portraits we make.  Because:

• we live in a pleasant pastoral area- that makes you feel good right away
• Many of the mom’s I photograph from Ann Arbor and Chelsea and Dexter and Saline come in wearing workout clothes after jazzercise or yoga or pilates or spinning… (to plan or choose their pictures, ha ha,not during  the portrait session)…Sooooo, my point is:  the healthy component of ‘happy place to live’ is alive and well here.
• lots of water and trees ( we have lots of places for beautiful outdoor portraits!)
• The families we photograph have strong ‘emotional health’.  I see them at their best when we make the family photographs-the portraits reflect so much love and happiness. I get the impression from the families at the studio that they enjoy living HERE in Ann Arbor, Dexter, Chelsea.
• Ann Arbor, as a college town has lots of youth, energy and optimism.
• lots of employed college grads who loved Michigan so much they never left-or could not stay away too long. They might not live in Ann Arbor proper, but they choose to live close by -Saline or Dexter or Chelsea or Pinckney

But then I thought, hmm, well maybe it doesn’t matter where you live- because Any family who cares enough to have photographic portraits made is just gonna be happy, and so maybe that explain’s why I see so many mostly ‘emotionally healthy’, with ‘healthy behaviors’ people in front of my camera.

Maybe it’s as simple as:  happy families choose to have family pictures made. Period.

So,  regardless of  if Photo Generations was located in Hawaii  or Arkansas (don’t know if Iver ever been there !) or Pittsburg I am positive that I would see mostly happy families in the portraits we make.

So did Ann Arbor (or Dexter, or Chelsea or Saline or Manchester or Milan or South Lyon or Pinckney) show in the national poll???? It’s funny, because Ann Arbor did not directly rank  in the poll, but one  favorite place we like to go to make family portraits DID rank in the top 10!  (And it was listed between Hawaii and Colorado–also, coincidentally wonderful places for family photography!)

And here’s a link to the article that got this ramble about happy families, portraits and places to live started:

Portraits on the Beach, anyone?  we in Ann Arbor love to go here for family portraits

Happy Labor Day!

We just finished up a session at Autumn’s house–gorgeous gardens with all kinds of niches:  the frog pond, grampa’s barn, the split fence post, the wagon wheel, the cool cobble steps.  We did a family portrait and even put the backdrop for an in-home studio look with Autums sports jerseys.  Then after the garden pictures, we went over to Autumn’s boyfriend Tyler’s place to do action pictures on his dirt bike.  A very Loud bike.  good fun.  Thanks for a good time guys.  Can’t wait to see the pix.  We’ll send you a link when the online gallery is ready.

If you have not yet done your senior portraits, don’t worry, we can still get a session done after school some day the next few days!  The No Limits session has you covered. We can make portraits at your place or at the studio just like we did for Autumn and Tyler. Just contact the studio and we can make it happen.

Update on Paint Town Purple American Cancer Society fundraising auction last week: Almost $15,000 was raised in the auctions. Someone got a great item: the family portrait certificate. Dexter was humming with folks spilled out on the street prior to the live segment. A surprise popular item at the silent auction-was a lilac tree. Go figure. I’m told the overall goal is $104,000–with many other activities-Hope T-shirt sales, a can drive, etc. culminating in the 24-hour run on June 21.

Oh, those big HOPE letters from the last blog post will be glowing all night long at the relay (behind Cornerstone School)

Coordinator Pam is very inspiring-she almost got me to sign onto a team–hers is 46 members strong–but other teams welcome participants, I’m told,should you desire to participate–sounds like fun and quite a gathering will be happening a few Saturdays hence.click here for details!!!

HOPE is the message in Dexter today, as evidenced by these huge letters in Memorial Park. I was a little surprised to see the HUGE letters out my window this am! But then I remembered: two auctions are happening today, part of a funddraiser for the local the American Cancer Society Relay for Life.
Sooo, slow down, and Stop downtown at today at Oneil’s Furniture where the Silent Auction is happening all day! Maybe bid on a portrait session and small wall portrait while you’re there.
Then this evening a live auction next door at Dexters Pub will feature Detroit Tiger phenom Brandon Inge and his wife Michelle Inge. A great opportunity to get your son’s mitt autographed, too.