Summer is here! A visit to Old Orchard Beach

I love Old Orchard Beach, Maine.  Always a signal of summer’s arrival, a few hours at Old Orchard just spins you right into summer mode.  The vinegary pier fries, the fried dough dusted (very liberally) with powdered sugar and cinnamon, the classic Lisa’s Pizza, it all brings me back. 

Growing up in southern Maine, Old Orchard Beach wasn’t as much a regular thing as you’d think, living only a few miles away.  For my family, with four kids, the cost of the rides and the food made this a twice a summer – maybe – kind of thing.  As I got older and could drive or had friends that could drive, it was where everyone went to “cruise” in the summer.  For many of us, as teens, it was where we had summer jobs and summer friends.  For me, it was the place I had my first record store job and because of that, the place I met my first husband.  

Like everything else, things change.  The town has had some rough times.  But if this past Memorial Day weekend was any indication, this summer won’t be remembered as such.  It will be a good year for Old Orchard Beach.

My daughter and I had a few hours to spare on Sunday of that weekend.  The weather was beautiful – warm, sunny – kind of a surprise at the end of May.  We decided to go “down the beach.”  I wanted to get some photographs from the top of the ferris wheel and my daughter just wanted to ride it.  One of the great things about the amusement park at Old Orchard Beach, called Palace Playland, is that you can buy just enough tickets to ride one ride, or in our case, three.  You don’t have to pay the big money for the whole day.  You don’t have to pay to get in.  You don’t have to pay if you don’t ride.  Easy.  Good for parents with kids.  If your kids are little and you’re not sure if they’re going to even want to ride, you get just enough tickets to find out.  If your kids are old enough and can ride by themselves, but still need some supervision, you can go and not pay for the privilege of that experience. 

So we rode the ferris wheel . . . 

from the top of the ferris wheel

looking west towards Saco

looking east toward Scarborough

Old Orchard Beach's main drag:  Old Orchard Ave.

And the “Superstar” – the scrambler ride you see at every fair.  And the little roller coaster, the Galaxi – not sure why, since we’ve ridden the big ones at Busch Gardens, Six Flags, and Cedar Point – but it’s been a while since we’ve had a roller coaster ride, so why not?  I’m not trying to compare Palace Playland to any of those parks.  It’s a totally different thing.  It just felt good to be flung and lifted and dipped and spun after a long winter. 

We walked around a bit then up the street.  Now I’ve seen the fried food options at some of the big fairs – fried twinkies, friend snickers bars, heck, I even saw fried butter and fried kool aid (don’t ask) last year.  Interesting as they might be, I’m usually watching what I eat and don’t want to part with six bucks for a fried twinkie when that could buy me two boxes of them (not that I would).  

But . . . we found fried oreos.  And they were only $1.00 each.  So we got three.  Powdered them up and then took them to the beach to eat.  They looked like squashed donut holes and when you bit into them, the cookie was warm and the creamy center, melted.  

fried, well, everything

deep fried oreo cookies with powdered sugar

creamy and melted on the inside . . this could be a new tradition

Old Orchard is a nice little community.  There are plenty of hotels, condos, shops and restaurants to support the large influx of tourists that come during the summer.  Visitors come from Quebec and New England and from all over Maine. 

Beyond the fried food, pizza, ice cream, and caramel corn . .beyond the lights and the rides and the games is . . The Beach. 

Go for the beach!

At low tide, the beach is flat and wide, great for running or playing games.  It’s clean and the sand is soft and powdery east of the pier.  Music is playing from the beachfront bars.  Seagulls and terns dip in and out of the tide.  Kids play in the sand.  Groups of teen girls lay on their towels.  Families and couples set up for the day with coolers and umbrellas. 

A short walk away is a carousel ride and a slushie drink.  What could be better?

For travel information about Old Orchard Beach and the Maine Beaches check out these websites:

The Maine Beaches 

Old Orchard Beach

One of my photos is featured today . . .

on this blog:  http://the4inone.blogspot.com.ar/2012/04/bubbles.html

Bubbles # 50 blue & yellow

Pretty cool huh?

They found it at my Etsy store.

Many thanks to Mariana & Paula from the Etsy shop Branda

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.

Christmas Stalking

The little trick or treaters had barely been nestled into their beds when I heard it.


The first jingle of the holiday sales season.

Marketers so focused on one of the three big kid holidays of the year quickly shifted gears and ads went from orange and black to green and red. Pumpkins into snowmen. Autumn leaves into snow flakes. Red ribbons on boxes and that silvery sparkle everywhere.


The seasonal queues not so subtly slide into place.

This brings me to the topic of Christmas stalking. Really, Christmas stock, as in stock photography. I just like to create that visual of the holiday lurking and haunting us as it does. Part of the ability of the advertising world to be able to send us those little hints of the impending demands of this time of year comes from their access to seasonal stock photography. By that I mean the photographs that are used just about everywhere you look, if you know that you’re looking at them.







It’s the sparkly Christmas tree branches, the smiling kids with snowballs in their hands, the happy family in new pajamas sitting by the fire, the pretty boxes stacked up in an unnerving tower being carried by a smartly dressed woman who appears to have it all under control.

Seasonal. Holiday. Christmas. Those are the keywords that click.

So I have to admit that it was months ago when I started thinking about holiday stock. I bought a few props at the dollar store and created scenarios to photograph for stock. This image is pretty simple: a cup, some fake holly berries, and the idea that it would imply a relaxing tea in a busy time.

Last year as I began to put away the ornaments, I found the contrast of the freshly fallen snow and the brightly colored Christmas balls impossible to resist. I tossed them out to see where they’d land. With a tangle of red raffia, they disbursed into these images.

The decorative pine cone on the snow. (I shot this sometime in March.)

The carefully and colorfully wrapped presents. (I wrapped these in September.)

The smiling little girl hugging her presents. (ok, this was shot in December, a few weeks before Christmas, and the presents are fake and she's a good actress.)

The point is that the images you’re seeing everywhere are often shot by people like me. And people like me think about stock photos all year round. I’ve become accustomed to the potential for any combination of items to, at certain times of the year, evoke certain emotional responses.




In order for the advertising folks to be able to access the images they need for any particular holiday or time of year, the stock photographer has to be thinking ahead.



At the end of the school year, take a few photos of the busses and kids with book packs so the shots are up on stock sites by the time back-to-school advertising begins, say somewhere around the middle of July. A big fan of the summer months, it really bugs me that the flip flops and swimsuits leave the store racks so soon. But that’s when the power of economic psychology begins its work on the mass market.


We seem doomed to mental battle with the forces of the media’s marketing monster. I’m just as vulnerable. And I know better. Sort of. I know that the jingle I heard on Halloween night was heard by zillions of people who didn’t think “oh god, they are starting with the bells already?”. They thought “hmm, maybe my dad would like that scarf.”

Despite my feelings about winter and the rushing of the season, I benefit from it. People who create these ads, somewhere in their air conditioned offices back in August was developing a Christmas ad campaign to sell whatever it is and started looking for “holiday ornaments” or “twinkling lights” or even “relaxing cup of tea with holly berries” and click, selected my image from the stock photography website, and click, I benefited from the holiday rush and the commercialism of Christmas.


In turn, like a circle of life thing, I took the pennies I made on the sale of that photo and added it to the pennies I made on the sale of “holiday ornaments in the snow” and “pinecone” and went shopping.

Maybe my dad would like that scarf . . .