Portraits tell the many stories of our lives. Imagine creating a wall art gallery around just one of your family’s stories, or even building on a gallery throughout time! How would your gallery look? What portraits would you include? As you think of the answers to these questions, consider how portraits live on beyond our lives – whether we are living here in the Round Hill, VA area or in London, England.

Our Bebe Coterie plan is perfect for telling the story of your child’s first year and creating a poignant gallery. But, it isn’t the only idea for creating a themed gallery!

Milestones

We have families return to us throughout the years so that we can capture their notable milestones. Sometimes it begins with their engagement and continues through their wedding and on to maternity and newborn portraits, and then more family portraits as the family grows and changes. Lifetime milestones make a great collection for a themed wall gallery.

Annual Family Portrait

The annual family portraits we take for many of our regular clients becomes a compilation built through time which you can display. They show your family as it grows through the years. Do you need to wait to begin your display? No, not at all. You can display your first annual family portrait and each year add to your gallery! We’re happy to use our exclusive design software to show you exactly what your portraits will look like on your wall before you order your wall art!

Sports

Does your child have a favorite sport? Bring in your child dressed in the uniform of their favorite game, and we’ll create a unique portrait for you. Imagine creating a wall art gallery in your children’s playroom, the family room, or a hallway using their sports portraits. What a great tribute to your child’s efforts!

Vacation Snapshots

Regarding taking photos of your own, make the decision early on to take at least one iconic picture at each family vacation. Have someone take several pictures of your family standing in front of a background representative of your vacation. These pictures can bring back powerful memories in the future, reminding you of the fun you had on family vacations! Display a collection of those photos as a themed gallery in your home and enjoy them for many years to come.

As a family portrait photographer in the Round Hill, VA and Northern Virginia area, we enjoy discussing portrait ideas and design with our clients and potential clients. Contact us to discuss yours!

Family Photographer, Portraits

Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, a mother-daughter portrait photography team located near Round Hill, VA in Northern Virginia. We specialize in timeless and emotive fine art family portraits.
 
Family means everything and capturing those precious moments to preserve forever will mean family heirlooms for you to share for years to come.
 
Best,
 
Mindy & Joriana – Contact Us!
 
Professional Photographer

Although you may know many tips and tricks to apply your makeup for everyday wear, you’ll find that hiring a professional makeup artist will make for an even more beautiful you for your Portrait Session. Think of it like the difference between a DIY hair color kit and going to a professional stylist who specializes in blending shades of hair color so that the result is a more natural looking color, one especially blended for you. In the end, which looks better? The professional’s work, of course!

An Artful Eye

A professional makeup artist’s artful eye sees the beauty and potential in each face. Not only are they trained to apply flawless, enduring makeup, they are also skilled in the art of making you feel at ease in every aspect of the process, working with you to create a stunning makeup style unique to you, one that will be timeless.

Makeup for Photography

Many different factors can affect your look, and makeup for photography is decidedly different from everyday makeup. You will most commonly notice this with brides. How many times have you seen a bride that didn’t look quite right in her photos? Did her skin look uneven or shiny? Were her eyes lost in the photo? Most likely, the person who did her makeup didn’t understand how to apply makeup suitable for a camera! A pro knows how to apply makeup for the camera, uses the perfect foundation color to match your skin tone, knows how to contour to bring out the right amount of shadow or highlight, and can select the right colors to make your features pop in exactly the right way. A pro knows how to make you look your most beautiful for the photographer’s camera!

Professional Makeup Products

If you were to compare your makeup bag to a professional’s kit, you would see they are vastly different! Professional makeup artists know which products to use, where to use them and in what intensity. This ensures you will look good both face to face, as well as in your portraits. Pros have access to and use a wide range of products from vastly different lines to achieve that flawless look. The majority of their products are waterproof and even suitable for HD film/TV. That means they will last throughout your portrait session, even the entire day, while still looking and feeling incredibly natural. You’ll love how you look – and so will the camera!

Education and Experience

A professional makeup artist has been trained in the art of makeup either through a makeup artistry school and/or an internship under other pros, and will have years of experience in this field. (Keep in mind that someone being licensed as a cosmetologist doesn’t mean he/she is fully trained in makeup application or has the experience necessary to provide a perfect makeup application each time. In fact, most cosmetology schools do not offer makeup training!)

Expert Opinion

A Portrait Session with a professional photographer can be exciting! With that excitement sometimes comes nervousness, though, because you want to look great for your portraits. It’s good to have an expert opinion on how to look your best in your portraits. A professional makeup artist will take more time and be more purposeful in applying your makeup than you would be at home. They will come to your location or to the location of your Portrait Session, will be punctual and efficient, and will ensure you are ready for your session, often with time to spare.

Confidence

As mentioned at the outset, and perhaps most important, a professional makeup artist is a great investment because you will come to your session feeling amazingly confident about your look. Having professional makeup applied for you not only helps you relax and feel beautiful inside and out, but will give you amazing results. When a client feels great about herself, her confidence is caught on camera and her portraits are even more beautiful.

Behind every beautiful model, singer or movie star, there’s an experienced and talented makeup artist ensuring she looks great in every single picture that is taken. Your Portrait Session, whether it is a family portrait, a beauty portrait or even a headshot portrait, is your very own mini-celebrity moment, and you should look and feel as amazing as those stars. Hiring a professional makeup artist is one way to guarantee that!

Family Photographer

Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, a mother-daughter portrait photography team located in Sterling, VA in Northern Virginia. We specialize in timeless and emotive fine art family portraits.

Family means everything and capturing those precious moments to preserve forever will mean family heirlooms for you to share for years to come.

Best,

Mindy & Joriana – Contact Us!

Professional Photographer

Throughout our lives, we will experience moments which disappear in a whisper. Some will be memorable; others are lost in time. Those moments create and often define our lives. As a studio photographer, we often ask our Round Hill, VA and Purcellville, VA friends and clients:
• How do you document your life for your children?
• How do you capture the special times in your children’s lives so that you can remember those precious moments rather than losing them to time?

What would be your answers to these questions?

Given that you are reading this blog post, then it’s likely that you have given some thought to these types of questions. It’s also highly likely that you value the role of professional portraits and the difference an experienced studio photographer can make in documenting your family.

We’d like to take a closer look at these questions and their answers and offer some tips based on our years of experience as a professional studio photographer.

How do you document your child’s life for them?

Professional Photography

If you haven’t done so already, you should make professional photography a priority in your family life. Prioritize the scheduling of professional portraits of your children and family as often as you possibly can.

Some clients do professional portraits annually and then use those portraits for their holiday cards and to decorate their homes. Those families take advantage of using photography to show how the family has grown and changed over the years.

Other clients opt to work with a professional studio photographer every other year. Some also schedule professional sessions for significant life events such as maternity, newborn, high school senior portraits, engagements, and other important events.

Whatever type of professional session you schedule, the important thing is to schedule it!

Snapshots

Family snapshots can be considered the bread and butter of documenting your family’s or child’s life. Keep your camera or smartphone handy so that you can capture daily life at a split second’s notice. Your child hugging the dog, playing outside, dressed up for prom, and so forth, are great photo ops to capture in a way a portrait photographer cannot because we’re not there on a daily basis.

Don’t make the mistake many people do of reaching for the camera to find it’s out of battery! Keep your camera handy and charged! Smartphone cameras are more sophisticated than ever and take some great pictures, too!

Those everyday pictures will help you document your family and, especially, your child’s life.

Lastly, don’t leave your snapshots living inside your camera or computer where you can’t enjoy or see them regularly. It’s not unheard of for something to go wrong and you lose them. We know someone who lost more than 1,000 precious family photos because they hadn’t backed up their laptop! We recommend using a cloud-based storage as well as occasionally taking the time to create printed photo albums you can order of your pictures.

How do you document your life for your children?

What does that mean, you ask? How are you documenting the lives of parents, grandparents, and other ancestors who are the story of your children’s history? It is their family story, the story of their roots.

Documenting the stories of those that came before your children is a precious gift you can make for your child. They will be so grateful as adults, when you are no longer with them, that you took the time to do so. Those portraits, along with photo albums of your life or your parents’ lives, are one way to document your life for your children.

Through portraiture, you are creating a powerful visual legacy for your children. Don’t underestimate the value of today’s portraits to future generations in your family.

Record Your Life

As a studio photographer, we urge you to record your life.

You can’t go back in time to take portraits, so there isn’t much sense lamenting what is now behind you. But you can assemble your story now through professional family portraits taken across the generations moving forward. Make it a point to capture images of your family and relatives, particularly your parents, your children’s grandparents, now while you can. Those will one day be especially beloved and cherished!

If you’re feeling particularly ambitious, you can write down your family’s history for your children to carry forth with them for future generations. It gives them a sense of self to know their family’s history. As the old saying goes: Roots and wings are the most valuable thing you can give your children! Photography has a unique role to play in giving your children roots and wings.

However you decide to do it, doing something is what matters! Record your daily life through regular snapshots whether using a camera or a smartphone. Document whatever you can so long as you leave a legacy for your children.

We have never heard a client complain that they took too many pictures, bought too many professional portraits, wrote down too much information about the family’s story. In fact, we’ve heard the opposite: Not enough pictures were taken when their children were young, and they never bothered to ask parents and grandparents for details of the family’s history. Remember that history matters to the future not yet lived, not yet born

Fine Art Studio Photographer

As a studio photographer, with both an indoor and outdoor portrait studios, we specialize in helping our clients document and tell their stories for today and tomorrow. Our Round Hill, VA, and Purcellville, VA area studio is always ready to participate in your family’s photographic journey. Contact us today!
 

Family Photographer, Studio Photographer

Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, a mother-daughter portrait photography team located near Purcellville, VA and Round Hill, VA in Northern Virginia. We specialize in timeless and emotive fine art family portraits.
 
Family means everything and capturing those precious moments to preserve forever will mean family heirlooms for you to share for years to come.
 
Best,
 
Mindy & Joriana – Contact Us!
 
Professional Photographer

Pssst! Would you like to know a little secret? We have a confession! We spend our days dedicated to photography and fine art portraits across the Round Hill, VA and Northern Virginia areas! But we love social media during our spare time!

Do you follow us on social media? If you don’t follow us, consider this your invitation. You don’t want to miss out on any of our fantastic information. What can we say? We aren’t just good at photography. We are also good at posting and collecting great information through social media – and it’s all to your benefit.

Like most people, we use social media for the interaction it affords us with clients, friends, and potential customers. Whether it’s Facebook, Pinterest or Twitter, we post a broad range of information including Ever After’s services and upcoming sessions. We don’t just post, though. We also use social media to keep up with the latest trends, products, and services related to our work.

Social media has done more than revolutionize people’s lives. It’s also influenced how businesses expose their brand and services and maintain an active connection to their clients. Here are some of the social media sites we use and the links to them.

We hope you’ll stay connected to us!

Facebook

Who doesn’t love Facebook?! You can find our website’s blog posts on our Facebook page along with other interesting information we like to post. Remember that when you “like” a Facebook page, you need to turn on notifications for that page, or you won’t see posts from that page in your news feed. To enable notifications for our FB posts, just hover your mouse over the “like” button and you’ll see a pop-up box. In that box, scroll down to Notifications and click on “on.” Voila! Now you’ll see our posts in your news feed. You can even send us messages via Facebook if you like! Let us know what topics you’d like to hear more about from us.

Twitter

Do you tweet? We do! You’ll find more information and tips from us on a broad range of things related photography, our work, and everyday life!

Google Plus

Although Google Plus isn’t yet as popular as other social media platforms, it’s a quick and easy way to find us — especially if you have a Google Plus profile as well! Click open our profile to find our contact information and a Google map for directions to our studios. You can send us a message or leave a review. Our blog posts are all right there by scrolling down the page!

Pinterest

We saved one of our favorites for last! We don’t know about you, but we love Pinterest! If you don’t have a Pinterest account, we encourage you to join. We have to warn you, though: it’s addictive! Our Pinterest account is there for YOU. We have 246 board full of ideas; 18,800 pins; and more than 2,000 followers! If you’re not one of them, you’re missing out! We have 16, yes, 16, boards on what-to-wear suggestions! We want to make your portrait session as stress-free as possible for you. Need some inspiration or ideas for your next portraits? We have 21 boards of inspiration. There are links to other photography websites for inspiration as well. We could on and on, but it’s much easier if you just visit our page and follow along!

If you’re interested in fine art photography and portraits in the Round Hill, VA or Northern Virginia area, we hope you’ll connect with us on social media!

Family Photographer, Family Portraits

Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, a mother-daughter portrait photography team located near Round Hill, VA in Northern Virginia. We specialize in timeless and emotive fine art family portraits.
 
Family means everything and capturing those precious moments to preserve forever will mean family heirlooms for you to share for years to come.
 
Best,
 
Mindy & Joriana – Contact Us!
 
Professional Photographer