Framing
I think every person who manages a household has those things that are important to them, but are not consistent in every home. Some people put a lot of time and effort into keeping furniture clean and polished and in tip-top shape. Some people clean windows or spend loads of money on coverings and treatments for those windows. Some spend hundreds of dollars on baking dishes (Le Creuset…I’m looking at you) or mixers. Me? I’m a framer.
I keep an eye on the clearance frames at Target and buy ones I find too cute to resist. Once we knew we’d be moving I just kept them in a stack to put into use in the new house. In the old house we had one hallways that was lined with frames…black on one side and wooden on the other. I had specific collage frames for specific trips we’d taken. Framed photos hung everywhere. Mostly recent photos because I take so many that I’m constantly updating frames with newer photos.
Now that we’ve moved, I’ve got plenty of frames on shelves and tables, but still haven’t hung and of the photos of people on the walls yet. I wanted to take this move as a chance update photos and also allow for new family portraits as I think we’ll be making a trip to Portrait Innovations at the end of the summer. (If you have one in your town, you should check it out. You get 3 backgrounds and 2 outfit changes and the photo packages are all Wal-Mart/Target studio level affordable.) So…I’ve been spreading out frames on floors and trying to plan out what frames will hold new family portraits (We haven’t had any made with Wes yet.) and then put my own pictures of the kids in other frames.
I look at my workspace above when I’m working on several frames, which I was last night, and imagine it’s something like quilting. I have stacks of recent photos I have printed and several frames/slots in frames. I move pictures in and out of positions and look at the frames/wall as a whole before committing myself. I always want to make sure we have everyone in the family represented as close to equally as possible. (Although across the house NikkiZ wins the award for Most Pictures…she’s too photogenic for her own good.) I also like to make sure everyone likes the pictures I choose of them. I try to make sure we don’t duplicate outfits or settings too often, and I like to make sure to include plenty of candid/non-posed shots. (One day I’d like to have a whole wall dedicated to these photos.)
It’s a weird hobby/obsession…but I think it’s a way for me to turn my digital hobby into something solid that I can enjoy. I love taking pictures of my kids. I take anywhere from 2GB to 5GB of photos a month. Taking the time to frame them and decide where to place them around the house allows me an excuse to print the photos up and to spend time flipping through them while I decide what photos should/could go where.
What about you…do you take a lot of photos? What do you do with them? Are you anywhere near as deliberate about the framing process/choices as I am or am I totally OCD about this? Because that’s okay if I am. I don’t mind.
You make me ashamed of myself. I don’t take many pictures at all. My youngest? The almost 10yo? Hasn’t been in a formal portrait since he was a toddler. We are having family pictures made in August; they will be the first in around 8 years. I don’t have any photographs on the walls, just decorative wall hangings, and not very much of those.
Pardon me while I go flog myself.
We have our wedding picture and graduation pictures around our walls – I think we need a nice one taken with our housemate at some point seeing as we’ve been living all together for like a year now.
I would love a Le Creuset cooking dish (like the orange one in Julie and Julia) but they are a little expensive just to go out and buy one lol.
One of the things I love about your home — the new one and the old one — is all the personal photos you have up in frames. I think it’s a great way to showcase your love and talent for photography AND do something with all those great pictures of your family you must have. I’m hoping to put up some interesting photos in our new place, but I’m sure I don’t have nearly the amount you do.
Ugh, because we are friends I am going to say this here and now:
Le Creuset is such an effing rip-off and fancy stoves are over-rated (unless you are running a restaurant or hosting conventions in your dining room) Some of the best meals I have had in my life were made on thin, aluminum pans in a dusty diner, or in old pans on a one-burner gas stove in a small kitchen, or on a road-side grills where you don’t question the cook and hope the power stays on (it didn’t! We ate in the dark, just off a highway between Islamabad and Peshawar – one of the BEST meals of my life)
All I am saying is that fancy equipment doesn’t make one a great cook. It just makes someone who FANCIES themselves a great cook feel good.
Anyway! Rant, over.
I take a lot of photos of my kids, but am horrible about printing them out. This house drives me nuts because it is very open with TONS of windows – while it is airy and light, there is very little wall-space here. I am not sure where I would put photos if I did print them. I have a new eye on my dining room, though and am considering a “gallery” option in here. Still deciding. That is awesome that you can do your own framing and NOT a weird hobby at all – a useful one. And how often can you say that about a hobby (says she who KNITS, which is FUN, but not EFFICIENT. In the least.)
Oh, I love Portrait Innovations so much. Did you know that when you buy three packages you get a CD with al the images they took? the resolution isn’t high enough for enlargements, but you can print decent looking 4x6s for it, and it is just so funny to see some of the outtakes.
I’m the same way about my frames. I try to make sure each of my kids are represented equally, with different poses and backdrops. Unfortunately, I don’t print out photos as often as I’d like and usually just build up one giant batch for a once a year printoff.
I take tons of pics of the kids, but I am very limited in what I hang around the house. When we redid the hallway I did hang my whole family in an organized way in there. And when we go home in september I am going to try to at least get new pics of the kids.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3509/4002745495_0871eeee95_m.jpg
I do have a lot of pics on my office wall, and I love putting them on flickr and creating a photobook once a year. So I feel I get use of my pictures, they are just not on the walls of our house…
I have great intentions, but fail with the follow-through (on a lot of things, not just pictures).
Generally speaking I take a lot, but after I finally (begrudgingly) switched to digital, I haven’t had many printed at all (just a few from my son’s wedding, which I put in a nice album).
I think it’s wonderful that you’ve gone to the trouble to frame and display lots of family photos in your home.
One thing I’ve really been enjoying is the “my pictures” screen saver on the computer. We have our computer in our living room with the workstation practically next to the TV — and the computer is on a lot. So as we’re hanging out, the screen saver cycles through my photos and I get to enjoy photos that way. I’ve scanned some of the old prints (some for the slide show our son had at his wedding), but want to do more — it’s so much fun to see photos of the kids when they were little (mine are 25, 22, and 19 now).
I take a lot of photos but I’m bad about actually getting them printed. The most recent photos I had printed were for a Father’s Day gift for my husband…prior to that maybe Christmas. I have a bunch of frames clustered on top of a piece of furniture and I never update them. I really need to improve about that.
I don’t take nearly enough photos and I never print them out. They just sit in the camera or on the computer. Who do you use for printing? I never update the pictures on the wall either.
I want to be like you when I grow up
(That is to say, when I someday have a family and home of my own, I also hope to fill it with photos! Even now, I have my “friends and family wall” with a bunch of sepia portraits that I’ve taken over the years – except one of my little sisters won’t let me take hers and this kind of annoys me to no end.)
I’m this deliberate but it means that I do it once a decade. Still have pictures in frames from 15 years ago. Most everything truly new is on the hooks of my Ikea dignitet, for lo, the OCD, it prevents much forward progress. As does the lazy.