snapstyle

Fuchsias make amazing subjects! They are so complex, with out of this world color and detail. Perfect for some macro shooting, and should make my client very happy… These are just a couple of shots taken:

I scored big points with this project I did for my wife a couple of years back, and have since done several for many clients. A few years back, we had the awesome fortune to find ourselves unemployed at the same time. Instead of being responsible and finding new employment so that we could ensure a happy and prosperous future with our 3 year old son, we decided it would be better to go around the world for six months! I can’t recommend this enough… we hung out in Thailand, Nepal, the Philippines, Turkey, China and Italy. Our son was 3.5 years old when we left, and he still brings up memories and images from the trip.

Anyway, we took a lot of pictures, because, as photographers, that just what we do! At the time we were using our Contax medium format camera that we lugged everywhere and took turns taking pictures of all kinds of things. When we got back, I made a couple of albums from the trip; framed a few of the better shots. But after a while, we never opened the albums, and the frames got replaced with the growing number of shots taken of our expanding family of kids and dogs.

So, I decided to make a lamp out of some of our favorite shots. I bought a Chinese lantern style tabletop lamp from Target, cut out the paper shade, and replaced it with pictures from our trip. I used this great photo transparency paper from Canon and printed the photos right on my home printer. Each photo is glued in place… and that’s it. The look of the photos back lit with a soft light is beautiful. It sits in our kitchen as a warm reminder of a great time in our lives - and a promise of more good times to follow.

Here are a couple of links of similar lamps that you might modify for your own light:

Haiku Designs Teahouse Lamp
Chopa Imports’ Soji Hanging Lantern

Or, if you’d prefer the Snapstyle Studios to the work for you, give us a holler!

We’re gluttons for punishment… in our 11 years of marriage, Lisa and I have taken on 4 remodels, often selling them just as the final coat of paint has dried. Our latest project, which we want to be our last, is a Vintage 1961 Rambler. Never touched by a remodeler, or any other tradesman as far as we could tell, we saw potential to leave our mark. One of the first jobs was to break down a couple of walls and make a dining room. After ripping out 40 year old carpeting, old drapes, and a rusted slider; new maple floors were laid, trim was milled and lighting was re-wired. The final touch was deciding what light fixture to hang over the dining table.

Combining two of our favorite things – cool lighting and photography – Lisa and I created a one of a kind chandelier that delights us daily. With wire and office clips threaded into a column of mesh wire that incases a light fixture, we clipped dozens of our favorite family photos (black and white, of course) on the fixture to create this cool, almost kinetic, sculpture. The picture I took doesn’t really do it justice, but it’s completely cool!

We started with a light fixture designed by Ingo Maurer that comes with poetry from around the world written on pieces of Japanese paper. While it is cool on its own, we thought photos matched our style a little better. The fun thing is that it has an interactive element, so we can swap out images or papers whenever we want. Love notes for Valentines Day; a tribute to someone’s birthday; a picture of a red and green glass ornament on every clip for the holidays… Oh wait, got to go move the laundry and get dinner started; maybe next year…

Check out the fixture at: www.formplusfunction.com/3439.htm . It’s a little pricey, but you could easily make your own.

We all have one or more; mine used to be under my bed… and in my closet, and oh, I think there still is a box in the attic. Pictures from all points of my life. Some I took, others my friends sent me, lots from Mom and Dad. Classic shots from college, embarrassing shots from my senior prom, tons and tons of shots of my kids. My Mom has always loved nature photography and regularly sends us photos of animals and birds she sees on the lake and mountain they live on in Maine, complete with captions and names for each animal on the back of the photo!

So many photos piled in boxes, storage containers and drawers, unseen for years, awaiting some elusive quiet time I will spend creating amazing scrapbooks and photo albums. Thank goodness for the digital photography revolution! No more unwanted prints, piles of photos, or un-categorized heaps. We can just shoot our pics, upload them to our home computer, and sleep easy each night knowing that the archiving of our lives through photographs is safe, organized and accessible.

Or is it? Now I have gigabytes of files with cryptic numbers for file names, and so many different ways to organize, tag, save, file and view my photos that I don’t know where anything is anymore! My system tray on my desktop has so many different software program icons all running something related to my photographs, I am sure I am giving away some terrible rights to some unknown cyber foe.

All I know is that 98% of the pictures I have taken throughout my life go unseen, stored away and pretty much inaccessible. There has to be more I can do to make it easier to see my favorite images, enjoy the memories and moments captured in my mind and in photographs, and share them with friends and family. In the coming months, Snapstyle and I are going to sort out everything from cool ways to manage and enjoy photos digitally to new ways to share them with the people in our world. I’m also going to put ideas and projects that celebrate personal style and the things that make us unique. Our mantra - It’s your life. Make it your own.

Please share your ideas and comments with me as well. I’d love to make this a spot for cool, creative people to share the ways they celebrate themselves and their friends and family’s uniqueness.

The Snapstyle site has been on ice for something like a year and a half! In that time, there’s been lots of work on photography projects, web sites and client work. Now, we’re getting back to business and will be coming out with a new site very soon!

In the meantime, I will post more thoughts, ideas, photos and inspirations in my continued quest to help everyone make meaningful, emotional, special memories that connect us to our past and future!