Welcome August

Well, August is off to a good start. Things are coming together for the calendar and our events, particularly the date auction. I had reached out to a marketing company that has helped us for the past few years with gift bag items and I asked them if they could help us again with gift bag donations and also with restaurant gift certificates. They sent some really nice gift bag certificates and they also sent 5 restaurant gift certificates, which is absolutely awesome! I really needed help with some extra certificates, so this is great. For the last few years, I've had to buy additional certificates because I couldn't get enough donated. It looks like this year, I won't have to do that.

Lisa has created the ad for Stuff magazine- we talked about the ad yesterday- it usually is a mini version of our flyer and it needed to pop more. It is a quarter page ad, so we don't have a lot of space to work with. Lisa has reversed the colors to make it a black background. She moved the logos as well. This is by far the best ad that we've had for Stuff.  Lisa also did our banner ad for BSSC. It is a small banner which will link to our site. Since it is a small space, we used a single girl image which is really eye catching. We added the tagline- "Boston's biggest fall singles event' to it. When I first opened my email and saw the image, I loved it. I've used the same image for the posting in the Yelp newsletter as well. I wanted to keep all our images consistent, but you also have to use what works best in the space that we are working with. In these cases, where we have small ad images, the image of one girl is more powerful than the group image which is on our website and event flyer.

This afternoon, I worked on one of my favorite tasks- choosing our calendar photos. It is a really time consuming task. It gets tiring as well, so I switched to other things- I didn't want to lose focus and start rushing through the photos just to get it done. There is so much to look for when choosing the photos- color, shadows, layout, expressions, body language. I did a photo with a beautiful little girl last week and I think I've found my cover girl. I won't know for sure until I see the calendar cover. Sometimes, photos can look different when you see them in black/white and fitted for the cover.

I was really struck by the photos from one shoot in particular. I did photos of two girls- one about 4 years old and the other was about 11 years old. I spent most of the photo shoot focused on the little girl and getting her to look at the camera and smile. The older girl was always smiling and looking at the camera, so I wasn't too concerned with her. When I looked at the photos, the older girl is so captivating in the pictures- she was a cute girl in person, but there is something about her in the photos that really stands out. She has a lovely smile and incredibly bright eyes- she radiates in every picture. I've photographed plenty of cute kids over the years, but I've never had it happen where someone radiates through her pictures.  I don't know how I didn't notice this in person- I think I was so caught up with getting a decent photo of the little girl. I bet she would have a career as a model because there is something about her in pictures that is rather magical.

Well, there is lots more to write about, but I'm going to watch some more Olympics and catch up on some work. Until next time friends...