Morning Motivation

Let me tell you a little secret: I am not a morning person. Not in the least. I hate getting up to the sound of my alarm, but I do it because it’s what we do. I’m not the worst person in the morning, I just would rather still be snoozing in my warm in bed.

Two thing that makes my mornings a lot more bearable are Paddington and Corduroy. They love waking up in the morning because it means love, cuddles, outside and breakfast (our dogs eat better than we do, more on that later). When my alarm goes off, the dogs start to stir and come close to me for some cuddling and pets…and of course, lots of kisses. Their love for the morning makes it a bit easier to get up. When I say the word “outside” they dart off the bed and whine at me to move faster.

I am so lucky to have these two little motivators to get me up out of bed in the wee hours of the morning!

Have a wonderful day,

Liz – Contact Me, I would love to speak with you!

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The Great Office Makeover ~ a peek into my world!

I would like to begin this post by proclaiming my undying love for IKEA. Thomas and I are very lucky to live quite close to the only IKEA in Eastern Ontario and if it weren’t for IKEA our house would be bare, save maybe our couches. I love that it’s so affordable yet looks fantastic and our style really jives with the designers at IKEA.

Most recently we undertook what we are calling “The Great Office Makeover”. When we moved into the house we wanted to have a room for our office and we were lucky enough to find a house that accommodated us. It is laid out in the room plan to be a bedroom, so when we started to talk about redoing the closet and creating a space with more storage we had to be very aware of the fact that it needs to be able to turn back into a bedroom should we ever move. The solution came through IKEA’s PAX Bedroom Wardrobe system. It’s easy to build it to suit our needs for an office, and very simple and inexpensive to turn it back into a clothing closet if need be.

Check out the super ugly fake wood closets. Ugh. They NEEDED to go!

One other thing I need to point out is that I am at my happiest when everything is organized. Some people even refer to me as an organization freak. It’s my nature – it’s just how I am! This was another reason why I was so excited to complete the office makeover.

I started by using the online IKEA PAX Wardrobe Planner and chose pieces to fit the space and it even printed it all out with article numbers and everything! We took that paper to the people in the bedroom section and they ordered everything up. Easy peasy….or so we thought.

What I didn’t realize is that with the online wardrobe planner, you don’t get to select the height of the wardrobes. We had measured and everything should have fit, until we realized we couldn’t actually stand the wardrobe up in the room – major fail! We had to load it back into the car and trek back to IKEA at 2pm in the afternoon on a Saturday. Now anyone who has ever been to IKEA knows that this is the absolute worst time to be visiting the store. It took us three hours to return everything and get the correct size. Finally we were home again and began building the wardrobe again. This time we were able to stand everything up and it actually went really smoothly from then on…except the dogs chewing random pieces we were trying to build. bad dogs. I guess little wooden dowels are just too tempting to resist a good chew!

Something I have wanted since I first saw it years ago is the Expedit book shelf. I have always thought it was really interesting looking and I love squares (as you may have noticed from my products: square cards and books). We found the perfects space for it in the office and that made me very happy.

Thomas and I are extremely pleased with the way the office turned out. We have more storage than we could ask for and things have proper places now! I have a space to package up my print orders and ship them out, Thomas has a white board to write out his thoughts and web designs and the dogs even have a new space to sleep in. Now we just need to figure out what we want in the frames and we’re set.

And here it is! I am completely in love with our new space and there are so many shelves that we actually don’t have enough stuff to put on all of them! Now that is problem I like.

From the other side – notice the empty frames (still need to figure out what’s going in there)

One thing I love about the new design is I have everything I need to package my orders up in one place as well as a surface to work on! Sweet! It also doubles as a display area for my products. I have my card samples hanging from the photo tree as well as some books and CD cases.

Just look at all the shelves and stoage…drool…Photographers please note my Shootsac Shelf! I convinced Thomas that my Shootsac and covers needed to lay nice and flat on their own shelf. Sweeeet! We also have a pretty rad business card drawer.

Some details. The keyboard that is framed is from my first ever Apple iBook. We saved it when the laptop died and finally found a display case that fit it. The mouse is Thomas’ old Apple Mighty Mouse that stopped working and the pair goes perfectly together.

With the entire office makeover there is one part that is hands down my favourite: the dog shelf. Now you might be asking yourself what a dog shelf is and I will explain. Ever since we got the EXPEDIT bookshelf, everyone kept telling us how Paddington and Corduroy could fit inside the cubby holes….so I made them pillows to fit! Now to put this in context I need to explain something: I am not crafty. I can’t sew to save my life and I quite often as a child would jam my mother’s “unjammable” sewing machine. So to decide I wanted to hand sew some pillows was a big undertaking. I measured, I cut, I stuffed and I sewed – I was so proud….until I put the pillows I had measured perfectly into the cubby holes and the were about 2 sizes too small. Oops. I guess I didn’t take into account the fact that the stuffing poofs them up and takes away from the size. I ended up stuffing two pillows into one hole and Corduroy loves it! Yay! I then cheated on the other cubby hole and just draped some fabric over a seat cushion and put it in there. They love both dog shelves so I guess that’s what matters most! I love looking over there and seeing the dogs in their little built in beds.

IKEA Ottawa
Pinecrest Shopping Centre
2685 Iris St.
Ottawa, Ontario
K2C 3S4

Want this look for your space?

Wardrobes are PAX with KOMPLEMENT Drawers and shelves and DRAMMEN doors with JIGGA Handles.
Book shelf on the left is BILLY.
Low book shelf is EXPEDIT with drawer and shelf inserts (the black ones are not available in Ottawa unfortunately, we got these in Toronto). Floating shelf is LACK with self adhesive battery operated DOT-it Classic LED lights from Rona.
Floating book holders by Umbra are from Chapters as well as the Fotofalls Desktop Photo Holder.
White boards are KLUDD Noticeboards
RIBBA Picture Ledges and RIBBA Photo frames in different sizes.
SPONTAN Magnet Board + magnets and Magazine Rack.
Awesome and fun Folders from Chapters.
Ottawa Dog Blog and Vancouver Dog Blog clocks.
FORSA desk lamps.
Desks are also from IKEA and we converted them to be standing desks.
Desk organizers are from Homesense.
Computers, as always, are Apple.

Have a wonderful day,

Liz – Contact Me, I would love to speak with you!

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The photos on this website are protected under the Creative Commons Canada License. You may share the photos on this blog with friends and family but you may not print, edit, crop or alter the photos in any way, the logos must stay intact and elizabeth&jane photography must be credited.

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Wonderful Winter Wedding

Ok so I am late blogging this. And by late, I mean two-months-has-passed-late! But alas, here it is!

At the end of January I had the pleasure of photographing Derek and Katrina’s wedding alongside the amazing Studio 1948. Their wedding was held at the Science and Tech Museum and was just beautiful. Despite the cold winter weather, the bride and groom just glowed with warmth and happiness.

And get this: they met speed dating! So awesome!

Without further adieu, our lovely newlyweds.

Have a wonderful evening,

Liz – Contact Me, I would love to speak with you!

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The photos on this website are protected under the Creative Commons Canada License. You may share the photos on this blog with friends and family but you may not print, edit, crop or alter the photos in any way, the logos must stay intact and elizabeth&jane photography must be credited.

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Earth Hour 2010

I am ashamed to admit that we actually forgot about Earth Hour the past two years. Each year we had every intention of participating, and every year we forgot. oops. This year Thomas and I vowed that we would remember, so we made plans – we set an alarm to remind us and got all of our candles ready. This is sort of funny because we are not candle people, so “all of our candles” really means two. That’s all Thomas could find in our entire house (minus some small little decorative ones that would have lasted all of 2 minutes burning.)

So we were set. As 8:30 crept closer I stopped working on my sample books (more on those later!!) and we shut everything electronic down. We’d had a late lunch so it seemed like a good idea to wait to eat dinner by candlelight – which we did!

It was a tad dark seeing as we only had the two candles, but we made do. I had a very yummy cucumber sandwich and Thomas had some humus and pita with some cucumbers. It was nice to shut down everything and eat in the dark!

Did you participate in Earth Hour? What did you do?

Have a wonderful evening,

Liz – Contact Me, I would love to speak with you!

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The photos on this website are protected under the Creative Commons Canada License. You may share the photos on this blog with friends and family but you may not print, edit, crop or alter the photos in any way, the logos must stay intact and elizabeth&jane photography must be credited.

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Aperture vs. Lightroom ~ Why I chose what I did

When I first started out in photography I wanted a program that could be dedicated to archiving and handling my files in an easy and comprehensive way. The options for me on a Mac were either iPhoto or Apple’s higher end photo editing suite, Aperture. I looked into Aperture’s features and decided to go with it. At that point, Aperture’s now biggest competitor, Lightroom, didn’t event exist yet.

Fast forward to today and I am still using Aperture. This isn’t because I haven’t tried Lightroom, I definitely have, but I chose to stick with Aperture for some key reasons.

One of the first reasons why I considered switching to Lightroom has nothing to do with the program itself, and everything to do with a company I have a ton of faith in. They produce fantastic products and when I heard they were releasing presets for Lightroom, I started to think that maybe I should consider switching. At that point, Lightroom had many features, such as the presets, that Aperture did not. The company that made me waiver my commitment to Aperture is Get Totally Rad.

Many photographers will already be familiar with the Totally Rad Actions for Photoshop. I personally cannot live without them. I use at least one of their actions on every photo I publish. They are stellar, extremely well made and worth every single penny in my opinion. And it was because of this awesome track record with the Totally Rad Action Sets 1 and 2, that when I found out they were releasing Lightroom presets, I actually gave Lightroom a try.

I read tons of literature and watched way too many tutorial videos about Lightroom and got pretty excited to try it out. It sounded awesome so I downloaded Adobe’s Free Trial to see what I thought. At first I played around with the presets and thought they were pretty cool, until I realized that I really wanted them to behave like Photoshop layers. I found it a bit difficult to navigate around and kept trying to make it look more like Aperture, in the way it displays how the files are organized.

Aperture stores its files in a very different way than Lightroom. Apple has created a self contained “packaging system” that essentially puts all of your photos into one single file. That may sound confusing, but it’s within Aperture that you are able to organize your photos into a very easy file structure. This simple packaging also aids in the backup process. Aperture allows you to back up with one single click to however many “vaults” as you’d like. I am sure there is a way to do this in Lightroom, but I wanted it to be the way Aperture is so the obvious decision was to stick with Aperture.

And that was it. I realized that I wanted Lightroom to be like Aperture as well as wanting it to be like Photoshop so I went back to my first loves.

I was rewarded and reaffirmed a few days after I made my decision with the release of Aperture 3 which brought features such as the presets that I had wanted from Lightroom. I was thrilled!

The only downside now is that Get Totally Rad has put out a statement that they will not be doing TRA Aperture presets, which really sucks but I will still hope that at some point in the future, they might revisit the idea. For now, I am so happy with using Aperture 2 coupled with Photoshop and I am quite confident in my decision.

Photographers: what do you use? Lightroom? Aperture? Adobe Bridge? Photoshop? Something completely different? Please share and tell me why you chose your selected product(s)?

In a few weeks I will be upgrading to Aperture 3 and I can’t wait!!

Have a wonderful day,

Liz – Contact Me, I would love to speak with you!

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The photos on this website are protected under the Creative Commons Canada License. You may share the photos on this blog with friends and family but you may not print, edit, crop or alter the photos in any way, the logos must stay intact and elizabeth&jane photography must be credited.

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