Pampered Puppy Dog Product Reviews

I am so excited to tell you about something I’ve been working hard at this month: the Pampered Puppy Product Reviews! I was approached by Pampered Puppy a few months ago about doing the product reviews for June and July and I jumped at the chance. It was such fun and Paddington and Corduroy loved trying out the products and posing for the pictures.

We reviewed four products this month and you can head on over to the Pampered Puppy website to see them.

I also have a lovely ad on the home page of the site which I am very excited about.

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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Brand Spanking New Books!

We are so excited to *officially* announce the launch of our new line of photo books! I say *officially* because we began offering these to clients in 2010 and they have been such a HUGE hit!!

All books are Hardcover with your favourite photo on the cover.

Our Family, Baby and Pet Clients can enjoy their photos in either a cute and portable 5×5″ size or a beautiful coffee table 8×8″ size with 20 full colour lay-flat pages – this means no more faces getting cut off in the margin! Sweet! The paper is just stunning – it is thick and displays the photos with a rich gorgeous colour.

The 5×5 size is great for new parents to carry with them to show off their new addition.

The 8×8 size is the perfect size to display in your home to all of your family and friends.

Newly engaged couples can get a personalized photo guest book for their wedding reception in 8×8″ with 20 full colour lay-flat pages. Ask us about our new Engagement Session + Reception Album Collection!

Our newlywed couples can enjoy their wedding photos in a stunning 12×12″ size with 40 full colour lay-flat pages in a beautiful leatherette clam-shell box. The 8×8″ and 5×5″ sizes are also available with purchase of the Bride+Groom 12×12″ book and are a great size for parent and grandparent albums.

All of the books pictured in this post are studio samples. If you’d like to see them, please let me know and we can get together to look at them! They have to be seen, they are just so beautiful!

If you had a session with us last year and are interested in ordering one of our awesome new books, please contact us!

Photo Books start at $175

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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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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The No Flash Challenge

I’d like to touch on my feelings about Flash on websites, which are actually quite negative. I studied web development in university, so I feel I have a justified reasons for my strong feelings against Flash. I would almost go so far as to say I loathe it. It slows down my experience, I am impatient and I hate having to sit there while a site loads, and people use it incorrectly. There are certain minimal uses for Flash but even then I am not sold. It angers me when an entire website is created in Flash that has absolutely no reason why it had to be done using that platform instead of in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Having said that, I do have Flash on my website – and I want to get rid of it.

With the recent announcement of Apple’s newest creation, the iPad (stupid name, but I definitely want one), I got to thinking about how a visitor experiences my website on mobile devices. Hand held devices such as smartphones, the iPod Touch, and the new to be released iPad don’t have the ability to display Flash elements and I don’t see this as a bad thing. Currently, there is a Flash viewer on my main home page, as well as my gallery page. For a while now I have wanted to combine the two into one viewing experience that resides solely on the home page. It is simpler and I wanted to do it without Flash, but still have the same dynamic sliding photos and automatic playing.

Enter my awesome code-man husband. Thomas, is a web developer and has his own company. I challenged him to prove to the photography community that a dynamic website without Flash can be done. Everything that everyone seems to love about Flash, cool transitions and movement, could be done without Flash. One major benefit of this is the fact that the site will work and function the way it does on a computer, on a mobile device, as well as having better SEO and will load a heck of a lot faster.

And he did it! The demo site uses my photos (yay!) and looks great! We will be implementing a gallery similar to this on the home page of my website soon and I am so excited about it! View the demo here.

Thomas also wrote a really informative article about the process and made a few great points. One in particular he touched on was music. I do not like music on websites, at all. When I am browsing, I am usually listening to my own music and don’t feel it necessary for the website I am looking at to be playing it as well. I find it almost obnoxious, especially when there is no way to turn it off. In cases like that, I leave the website almost immediately.

To quote from his article:

“If you are using music, make sure you have permission to use the music on your web site. You, as a photographer, worry about people stealing your photos, so why would you steal someone’s music?”

This point is bang on. Almost every photographer’s website that includes music, is playing a popular song by a well known musician. I doubt they have permission from them to have their song playing. As photographers we worry about our photographs being stolen and I am sure it’s happened many times – I know it has to me. So if you are using a musician’s song without consent, isn’t that the same thing?

A lot of people disagree with me on the music front, but studies have shown that on a whole, music is more detrimental to keeping people on your website than if you didn’t have music.

I’d love to see photographer’s rise to the challenge of creating a website that is viewable in all platforms, including mobile devices. A photographer’s website is crucial to their brand and if you would like to have yours be rid of Flash, contact Thomas – he’d love to work with you to achieve that goal!

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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Updated About Page!

Jane and I decided that our about page was too much business, not enough personality. So we set up a fun photo shoot with my iPhone and had a great time being silly and goofing it up for the camera…while holding a camera! We wanted it to be more personable and so you can see what we actually look like.

Check the new about page out here and read our new bios and see the fun pictures.

Have a wonderful day,

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

elizabeth&jane photography elizabeth&jane photography blog Destination Wedding Photography

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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