DIY Instax Wall Art

 

For my birthday last March, Sam got me a Mini Instax Camera, and since then we've enjoyed going on small and large adventures to use it. I'm sure that if you've ever played around with any type of instant camera, you know that it can be a blast.

PicBoxPro Fireplace Mantel Update

This post is sponsored by PicBoxPro where I received free product in exchange for a review.  All opinions are 100% mine.

I was really excited that we got our first official family pictures taken this last fall by the talented o get our  McKell Morgan because I knew this time was going to be different.  I was going to get them printed and replace all of our old family pictures with the new ones.  If money wasn't an issue, I would have loved to get a nice canvas print of our family and put it above our fireplace mantel to make a big statement.  After investigating and comparison shopping a 30X30 canvas print was going to cost me up to $110 at Costco!  Well, I needed to feed my family this month, so that wasn't going to work.  I'm happy to announce that I found a more cost effective way of getting that big statement canvas print of my family, say hello to PicBoxPro. 

PicBoxPro is not your ordinary online wrapped canvas print ordering store.  They're a small and local business who calls Provo, Utah their home.  I'm all about supporting small businesses. PicBoxPro was born to make creating and ordering amazing canvas prints as easy and painless as possible. Traditionally high quality gallery wrapped canvas prints have been too expensive. They're changing that. Their passion is creating masterpieces that are affordable to everyone.

What sets PicBoxPro apart is their quality, attention to small details, and their awesome customer service.  Ordering your wrapped canvas was easy. They have a built in program in their website where you select your photos, select your canvas size, and you can move, edit, add text and graphics to totally customized your wrapped canvas.  You can preview your purchase before you add it to your cart, which made it really helpful because I made several changes to my pictures.  

After I placed my order, I received a phone call from PicBoxPro.  They told me that during my ordering process, I didn't move the picture high enough on the canvas, so the very top part of the canvas where it folds over, was showing white.  I didn't catch that during the ordering process, so they called to let me know, and asked if I wanted them to fix it!  I was so touched that they would call me to double check.  

When I received my canvas it was two days after I ordered it, now that's what I call fast service! I opened it up, and fell in love.  It looked great, the colors were vibrant, and the canvas was thick.  I turned it over and saw that my canvas had a black dust cover, installed sawtooth hanger, and felt bumpers!  It was all ready to be hung.  Get this, the same 30 X 30 size print I was eyeing at Costco, cost $20 cheaper at PicBoxPro AND Costco didn't include all of the extras in the back like PicBoxPro does!    

I love how my 30 X 30 wrapped canvas makes that big statement I wanted to make in our family room.   

One helpful tip when creating your wrapped canvas.  I found certain sizes didn't work well with horizontal pictures.  I was wanting to order the 21 X 36 size wrapped canvas and I had to zoom in the picture a lot to get the picture to fit and cover on all of the sides.  If I didn't zoom in, then the wrapped sides would be shown white because the picture wasn't wide enough to cover the sides.  I hope this makes sense.  After playing around, I found the 30 X 30 size was going to fit my horizontal picture a lot more comfortably.  Rule of thumb, make sure to play around with the different canvas sizes, some might be better for vertical or horizontal pictures.

7 Tips to Beautiful Family Pictures

There's a lot that goes into family photos: picking out outfits, making sure hair and makeup look good, finding a photographer, and that all family members are in happy spirits.  Making sure all of these things are in order can cause a lot of stress and this stress can show up in your photos.  Then whenever you look at those photos hanging on your wall you're reminded of how crappy and stressful that experience was.  Ugh.

SO to avoid all of that, here are some tips I've found to be really helpful for my family and hopefully they'll be helpful to your family as well:

Family Pictures from McKell Morgan Photography

McKay, Amelia, and I a couple weeks ago got our pictures taken by the lovely McKell from McKell Morgan Photography.  McKell and I went to high school together so we've known each other for years.

McKell is a gifted photographer, she self taught herself on how to use the camera and is known for her newborn and family sessions.   She is my favorite photographer I've ever used.  She knows how to capture people where their personalities cam come through. She's all about capturing moments in families.  One reason why I really love her is because she exudes this calmness and chill vibe that really rubs onto you, and therefore making our photo session a lot less stressful.  If you live in Utah and need an exceptional photographer who is so great to work with, affordable, and has great style and taste, check out her photography on her site McKell Morgan Photography.

Here's some of my favorites from the session:

McKell also did Amelia's newborn pictures.  The most awesome part about her newborn sessions is she comes to your house and takes the pictures there!  We did them in our bedroom and in the backyard.  This was extremely convenient instead of having to drag all of my crap to a studio with a two week newborn.  Check out my favorites from her newborn pictures.

Thanks McKell for making us all look so beautiful!  Looking through these newborn pictures is making me kind of baby hungry.  Check out McKell's portfolio, services, and contact information on her site.

Photo by Emilie Online Class Giveaway!

It's been my New Year's Resolution to understand and know how to use a DSLR camera.  I wanted to be able to capture precious moments in a beautiful way and wasn't feeling like I was achieving this with my snap and shoot camera.  I used to work as a photographer at a studio in high school and at a college newspaper in college and used a DSLR camera, but never had the chance to really learn how to use one.  I felt really intimidated by all of the components like: f-stop, aperature, ISO, white balance, and didn't understand how they played a part in taking pictures.  I didn't know where to start!