You guys, I get it. You love your photos. You really do. But you take so many that you are completely overwhelmed. Like, totally shut down. I was there. As you can see in the image above, I have over 8,000 photos from 2015. Me. A professional photo organizer who is meticulous about going through and deleting unnecessary images. So I can only imagine the volumes of photos those of you who do NOTHING with your photos must have.

To prep for the launch of my new product offering, Year In Hand Family Yearbooks, I felt I should have one of my own to use as a sample. I always feel more comfortable marketing my own products vs. using products with my client's photos in them. In March 2016, I started to design a yearbook for my own family and by August 2016, I hadn't even completed the photo selection process. It took me over FIVE months to go back through the 8,000+ photos to even decide what should be in the yearbook. It was exhausting. I LOVE my photos. I love looking at them; I love the memories and feelings they evoke. I marvel at how my kids are growing and changing and yet, I tired of the process. 8,193 photos, y'all. From ONE year. Ugh.

Going through that process for my own family only solidified that my greatest desire is to solve this problem for you. Yes, you. The family memory keeper. The one who loves taking photos of your family. The one who loves documenting the up's and down's of your life story. And yet, the one who rarely looks at them again, if ever, after you click that shutter. You owe it to your family to share your stories, to reminisce on the good times and maybe even the bad. To laugh at the grumpy face in the photo or the sharpie drawn all over your walls. To re-live special vacations and the daily minutae that you deem important enough to capture.
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I set out to design a service that would be simple, not overwhelming, and cost-effective, not cost-prohibitive. Signing up for Year In Hand Family Yearbooks monthly subscription service will cost you less than a Starbucks a day and will reward you with a stunning retrospective of your family's prior year to proudly display in your home. A gorgeous book that will allow you to bond with your family, to share your stories and to enjoy your photos again. The process is a breeze! I set you up with a privately shared Dropbox folder and send you a monthly e-mail reminder to send me your favorite photos from the prior month. I design your book as we go and you get to review & make edits quarterly. That's it! That's all you have to do! Send me 30-40 of your favorite pics each month and shortly into the New Year, you'll receive the best gift of all: a full-color retrospective of your family's memories, sitting right in your hands.

If you're one of the 2 out of 3 parents who don't enjoy managing your family's photos or one of the 60% of families who haven't printed a photo book in FIVE years, don't hesitate to contact me today!

Photos courtesy of Yehudis Goldfarb Photography

In this day & age, there are a plethora of excellent photographers making a name for themselves with family sessions, newborn session, senior sessions, etc. But never before have I met a photographer mainly focused on capturing a woman's inner power & beauty, showing them through her lens what they often can not see for themselves. I recently sat down with fellow Lake Ridge portrait artist, Mina Habibi, to learn more about her business and what makes her vision unique.

Alex Beadon threw out a tough challenge for Day 6 of her #FeelGoodBlogging challenge. We were asked to be vulnerable and share something about ourselves that might push us out of our comfort zones, but would ultimately allow our readers to learn even more about us. So let's dive in!

I was always a hard-working, dedicated student. Pretty much all straight A's from the get-go and by high school, was on a path towards all Honors and AP courses. That is, until my sophomore year. I was placed in the Honors English class and after turning in one of our first writing assignments our teacher announced to us that only a handful of us were "A" students, a few more were "B's" and the majority of us would be "C" & "D" students, according to her [highly subjective] opinion. At least that's my recollection of her speech. And you can imagine, for a girl who always strived for A's, this terrified me. But here's the thing about me, most definitely as a teenager, and even sometimes to this day: that rather than rising to her challenge, and BELIEVING IN MYSELF that I could get an A in her class, I shrunk in fear that I would get my first C or D. This had me in a state of panic, so much so that I arranged a meeting with her, my guidance counselor and my parents. The outcome of which was the decision to drop out of her class and return back to the non-Honors English class. That switch began a snowball effect that eroded my self-confidence, the belief in my intelligence and my academic abilities and by the time I graduated from high school, I was in NO Honors classes. I didn't even want to go to college, but wanted to pursue dance full-time.

Thankfully, my parents wouldn't hear of it and I did head off to James Madison University in August of 1990. It was there that I first encountered the notion that maybe my sophomore year Honors English teacher only had one opinion about my writing skills, not a hard fact. After turning in an essay about "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest," my college English professor called me to his office. I was terrified. I thought I was in for a lecture on my poor writing skills. Instead, he said to me, matter-of-factly, "Megan, this is the most well-written Freshman essay I've ever read." Can you guess my reply? "That can't be true. My high school English teacher told me I couldn't write well." I was shocked to say the least. And thankfully, he was very encouraging. But it has literally taken me decades to erase the doubt that ONE teacher planted in my mind and in which I so readily believed. I would give anything to go back to my carefree days as a young girl, when the world was my oyster and I hadn't given anyone else the power to erode my confidence.

Two things have occurred since then that have helped me start believing in my writing abilities again... first, in starting my own business and associated blog, I am regularly amazed at my own posts, how easily the words flow out of me and in a clear and coherent manner, no less. Second, I found out this year that my high school English teacher had passed away and I thought, a la Elsa, "OK. It's time to LET IT GO." I've allowed her opinion to eat away at my confidence for far too long. It's time to release her hold on me and move forward with the knowledge that I can, in fact, not only write, but write well.

We all have negative self-talk that erodes our confidence, instills guilt and makes us generally feel lousy. So today, try a dose of self-love. Try BELIEVING IN YOURSELF. Because the only opinion of you that truly matters in the end, is your own.

It's only mid-October and already I'm swimming in my daughter's Kindergarden art projects. I'd imagine any of you with school-age children are in the same boat. I also imagine there are some of you who aren't overly sentimental and are comfortable tossing them away after a while. But for most of us, we want to hold on to every bit & piece of our children's childhoods, for them to look back on as they grow older, maybe even to show their OWN children some day. But if we were to actually keep every piece of paper and project they bring home over their school years, we'd need to rent a storage unit to store it all. So I'm here with a helpful tip for you. Design and print a book of your child's art. I did this for my daughter's preschool years and am preparing to create another of her more recent artwork. 

It's actually a quite simple process. Gather all the artwork you deem special, AKA "Keepers," then either scan if small enough, or photograph if larger and/or three-dimensional. Upload all the images to a folder on your computer (I called mine "Caitlin's Art") then upload them to your favorite digital photo book site. For the one pictured here, I used Shutterfly's 12x12 size with lay flat pages. You can decide to arrange your book chronologically, by season or school year (you can combine several years as I did) or you can arrange by category. Perhaps they had phase of drawing rainbows, self-portraits, etc. You can group those images all together to visually SEE the progression of their skills. You can leave the book as simple as images alone, or provide captions when necessary to explain a project. Or even have your child tell you a story about the image and include the entire text on the following page.

Once your book is completed, ordered and received, your child will LOVE "reading" it with you. They will feel a sense of pride that you cared enough about their art to turn it into a book, which will in turn increase their self-confidence. As they grow, they will also enjoy being able to pull a book down off the shelf that houses their art in one simple package vs. digging through bins and bins of original art. Once you feel comfortable that your artwork images are backed up in several locations, you can take that final step of throwing away the originals. Maybe not ALL of them, but enough that your house isn't overflowing with children's artwork.

If you've enjoyed reading my #FeelGoodBlogging challenge posts so far, I invite you to sign up for my monthly newsletter subscription list. Once you join, you'll receive access to my exclusive ABC's of Photo Organizing video!