The gift of giving . . . gives back



boat in scarborough maine

As a photographer and the “creative” one in my family, I often find myself charged with creating the “unique” and personal gifts that we like to give. Okay, really, I take on these projects myself, never usually assigned by anyone, just me and my desire to give gifts at Christmas that are not store bought, not discount, not last minute attempts. I want to use my talents to give something to someone that 1. They can actually use. 2. They think is cool. 3. They won’t get from anyone else.

I find that the process of sorting through photos, for me, is a gift itself. Doing something like this gives back as you get to relive some of the memories associated with the images. No matter what the subject or theme, whether it’s a year in review book or a calendar of wedding photos, you are the one making the decisions about which images to include and what kind of story you will tell.

We recently lost our cat and miss him terribly. I decided to make my daughter and husband each a book of photos of him (and ended up making a calendar, too). I sorted through 4 ½ years of photographs, looking for shots of him or with him in them. I was happy to find that all those photos I took of him just trotting across the lawn, or holding a mouse in his mouth, or lounging (and this cat could lounge!) found a purpose in these creations. It was a wonderful experience for me to be able to relive our time with him and our lives that went on around and including him. When my husband gave us Jimmy Buffett tickets for Valentine’s day, our cat was right in the middle of the fake rose petals and pink wrapping paper. At our first Christmas in our new house, I photographed him crouched under the tree, illuminated by the lights. He was a part of our lives, the small events I photographed, the times we remember.

Photographs, in many cases, are all you have to recall special times and people. Long after the wedding – the dress doesn’t fit, and the cake top is gone – you have your photos. You can go back to the places you’ve visited when you look at the vacation photos. You can share these experiences with others on facebook or twitter. The pictures of the way we spend our lives have meaning to you as a photographer, as the one who stood in the sand to shoot the palm tree and the snorkel gear, or the one who looked up from bird watching to catch the cat using your garden as his litterbox. For this reason, the giving of memories is a gift to both the people behind the camera and the recipient of the thoughtfully crafted gift.







So with this in mind, I tend to turn to photographic items such as calendars, photo books, coffee mugs and the like. To create this stuff, I have found that there are a million websites you can go to where you can upload your photos and use them to make items. At this time of year many of them offer pricing specials which generally do save you some money.

While being a professional does allow me some access to sources out there who cater to photographers, I usually go back to Shutterfly http://www.shutterfly.com/ for holiday gifts. I’ve also used MPIX http://www.mpix.com/, and Vistaprint http://www.vistaprint.com/. These online vendors cater to everyone. Their pricing is competitive in the retail market, which doesn’t make them a viable option to use when I’m selling the work, since I need wholesale pricing in order to be able to realize a profit. But for gifts, it’s reasonable. Most importantly, I find that the quality is good, depending on the item.

Shutterfly does a great job on calendars and photo books. The calendar templates are easy to use and you can upload as many photos as you want. They have a wide variety of designs to start with and you can select the number of images you want to use on each page. Another feature I like of theirs is that not only can you assign special dates within the year (Joe’s birthday, our anniversary, etc.) you can now add a photo to the date. It’s really nice for the visual queue for a date you want to remember. The paper stock they use for calendars is a nice durable cardstock which comes packaged in individual plastic zip bags. I’ve also done several photo books on Shutterfly and they’re crisp and bright and well bound.

MPIX has undergone changes in the past year as they transition from a “photographer’s” lab to a broader base. That’s just my analysis and I could be wrong about their strategy. Their partner lab, Miller’s is the site used by photographers who want to create albums of wedding photos for clients and other client centered products. MPIX is good for prints and framed or mounted artwork. If you want your photo of the waterfront where you spent your honeymoon printed on metallic paper and mounted to a foamcore board, MPIX can do that and get it to you in 2 days. I use them for my gallery prints. Their quality is fabulous. What I don’t like is that after a certain period of time, your photos will be deleted from your albums. I guess this is an effort to save space, but I like to be able to go on and order the print I need and not have to keep uploading images repeatedly.

Vistaprint seems to be everywhere these days. They advertise on eBay and once you’re on their mailing list, you’ll get emails about every sale and promotional item they’ve got, and they’ve got a lot. The things that I’ve had a lot of success with and found the pricing and quality to be good enough for me to resell are the postcards and notecards. I’ve designed and purchased many different layouts. They’re also good with business cards (cheap!) and rubber stamps and stickers, all of which I use as part of my branding for my business, to create a cohesive, intentional marketing effort. For holiday and other gifts, they do offer Christmas cards and postcards, which I would imagine would be of the same quality. Last year I ordered a few calendars just to see what they’re like, as I had received an email stating they were FREE (got to pay shipping) and found myself engaged in the design only to find that Vistaprint charges $4.99 per image to upload your photos. They must have been running some kind of special (they always seem to be doing that) or I would not have paid upwards of $60 to upload a dozen photos. And I was disappointed by the quality – thin flimsy paper with cheapy feeling plastic ring bind, like this was a school project and not a professionally designed calendar – not good enough for me to sell and the prices to buy make them unrealistic to do so. My advice with Vistaprint: stick with the things they do well – business cards, postcards, notecards, stamps. Something I truly dislike with this site is that when clicking through a promotional email and logging into your account, the pricing often changes. Something advertised as free somehow ends up as $7.99 once it gets to your cart. By that time you’re so invested in the item that you get it anyway. They offer a ton of other “services” and products and it can be hard to just get to the end because you’re bombarded with marketing. But if you get through it all, some items are worth it.

The other day I received the calendars I made for my family and friends. Rather than giving them photos that are best sellers for me, I used only images from the past year. It gave me an opportunity to pour through and relive our year and be able to highlight some images that I have yet to post for sale or otherwise show the world. I took the time to make the edits necessary to use the image in the calendar and take them to the next step. The best part is that I was reminded that we had a pretty good year, a year of a lot of changes, loss and love, fun and family. While I was showing the calendar to my husband and daughter, I told them about how the rocky coastline photo in July is from when we went camping this summer on Hermit Island and that the blue shuttered house on that same page was from when my daughter and I took a day trip to Bar Harbor. August 2012 is full of our August 2011 adventures and includes the Victoria platters at Longwood Gardens and the adobe window and cacti from our stop at San Juan Capistrano in California. I’m anxious to share these memories with my family and friends and show them around my year.

This is the gift I get by sharing.