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9 Maryland Towns You Should Spend More Time In | Northern VA Family Photographer
9 Maryland Towns You Should Spend More Time In | Northern VA Family Photographer
Photographers will tell you that there’s so much more to Maryland than Baltimore or nearby Washington, DC or our backyard of Leesburg, VA! If you haven’t set out to explore any of these nine small towns, you could be missing out. They run the gamut from waterfront to sleepy town. Grab your car keys and get going! Don’t forget your camera!
Ellicott City:
This reportedly “haunted” town is situated between Baltimore and DC. From its stone mill buildings to it shopping and a brewpub, you can’t go wrong in this town that has retained much of its historic charm.
If you’re a whiskey lover, check out Judge’s more than 250 varieties.
Berlin:
Not quite like its namesake in Germany, it’s still worth a visit for its architecture and natural setting. Often overlooked by beachgoers heading to the Coast, those who do stop will find historic buildings and a relaxed feeling to this small town. Check out Toy Town Antiques or the old Globe Theater dating back to 1917. The Runaway Bride and Tuck Everlasting both filmed here and no wonder! It’s beautiful!
Hampstead:
If you love photography and history, grab your camera when you visit Hampstead where you can travel back in time along Main St. Hampstead. Stately colonial homes, historic police station, and antique shops dot the small downtown. History buffs will enjoy the Civil War markers throughout town that will take you up to Gettysburg an hour north.
Crisfield:
You can’t go any further south without ending up in Chesapeake Bay. Bordered by Tangier Sound and the Pocomoke River, this is a water-lover’s paradise. It’s referred to as the “crab capital of the world” (we haven’t confirmed this claim, but you can try)! There’s every water sport including fishing, marsh sanctuaries, maritime museums, and, believe it or not, a crab derby every Labor Day! Don’t forget to try the hard blue crabs while in town – to eat, not race!
Eastport:
So near, and yet so far! Eastport is just over the bridge with a far more laid-back feel than Annapolis. You won’t lack for history or beauty here, though. You’ll enjoy the view back toward Annapolis in this town with a resort-like feel. Plenty to do in town from kayak rentals to the Annapolis Maritime Museum and oyster festivals.
Takoma Park:
This might be a DC suburb, but you leave everything behind in this hippie-vibe town. There’s vegetarian-friendly restaurants, vintage clothing stores, yoga studios, and music shops. If that doesn’t sound granola enough for you, check out their annual jazz and folk festivals.
Havre de Grace:
Halfway between Baltimore and Wilmington, Havre de Grace is like a mini New England beach town. From it’s own boardwalk to its newly restored Concord Point Lighthouse. If you love duck decoys, you’ll love the Maritime Museum or Decoy Museum filled with nearly 3,000 wooden decoy ducks.
Monkton:
Drive 20 minutes out from Baltimore toward Monkton and you’ll hit horse country. Stately homes dating to the 1800’s, along with gorgeous countryside and horse farms make up this town. In the summer, you can rent an inner tube and float down the Gunpowder Falls.
Oakland:
This is Oakland, MD, not Oakland, CA – so there’s a big difference. If you love fall colors, head here. There are 54ft waterfalls gush in between the lush autumn leaves at Swallow Falls State Park. Deep Creek Lake here is the state’s largest body of water and a good place to jet ski, go boating, and tubing. Downton Oakland offers art, books, and an old fashioned ice cream parlor in an antique-filled shop.
For must-eat foods and more info on these 9 Towns, follow this Thrillist link.
For more information on traveling in Maryland, follow this link to VisitMaryland.org.
As Leesburg, VA area family photographers, we’re always interested in hearing about previously not visited places in our state and our neighboring states. If you find or know of any special spots, we’d love to hear about them!
Family Photographers
Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, a mother-daughter portrait photography team located near Leesburg, 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
Can You Truly Put a Value on Family Portraits? | Northern VA Family Photographer
Can You Truly Put a Value on Family Portraits? | Northern VA Family Photographer
Value of Family Portraits
What is the true value of family portraits – or any portraits for that matter? Ask someone who has lost a loved one. They will tell you that they no longer have the person to touch and hold. Every picture, every portrait they have of their loved one is cherished and is priceless. As a photographer, we know the value of a portrait and just what our portraits can capture: love, family and, in many ways, time. You can’t recapture those moments. Having worked in the Leesburg, VA area for years, we have met so many clients grateful they took the time to do family portraits with us when they had the chance.
Clearly, professional family photos will capture what a snapshot or selfie won’t. And, because it’s printed on archival-paper, it will last for a generation and more. But is there any value for you in investing in professional portraits? While we have a vested interested in people paying for professional portraits, we’d honestly tell you that there is tremendous emotional value in having professional pictures taken.
Lasting Memories
As human beings, we have limited capacity for memories. No matter how good our memories, we can’t possibly remember everything. Photographs serve as memory triggers. Look at a picture taken years ago, and chances are it will take you like a time warp to that moment or day when the photo was taken. Do any of your childhood memories resemble a picture you’ve seen? It’s not unusual. Science has shown that pictures can trigger memory.
One of the reasons we are professional photographers is because we appreciate the valuable role family photos play in our lives. Professional family portraits depict families today and memories tomorrow. Simply stated: Photographs capture and create memories. How do you put a value on that?!
Just like the ancient oil portraits were painted out of love and reverence for the subject, the fine art portraits of today are tokens of familial love. They are the newer version of those old stately oil portraits which once graced the walls of the elite mansions and families and were handed down through the generations.
The family fine art portraits we take today are as well-thought out as those oil portraits once were. While we might not be around to see an Ever After fine art portrait hanging generations from now, we know that someone’s family will enjoy them one day many years from now. How do we put a value on that?
As a full-service photographer working in the Leesburg, VA area and beyond, we work with each client and their needs and their budgets. We will have an initial talk to see how we can help you best capture your family’s love in one of our portraits. From there, we can help you plan your photo session and, lastly, your product order. There is no pressure, only partnership to work with you how you like. We hope you will reach out to us to discuss your portraits if you haven’t already!
Family Photographer
Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, a mother-daughter portrait photography team located near Leesburg, 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
Family Portraits, Jesse and Amy | Northern VA Family Photographer
Family Portraits, Jesse and Amy | Northern VA Family Photographer
The fun-loving and playful Schnelzer Family, with two active little boys, spend a lot of time outside enjoying the beautiful Northern Virginia weather. Between sports, bike rides, and playtime typical of a family with active little boys, the family found time to prioritize family pictures. They found what they wanted in Ever After Portraits, photographers who specialize in family photos in their own private portrait park near Leesburg, VA.
This handsome, busy family loves to take nature walks and enjoys a lot of outdoor activities. Amy wanted their family pictures to be taken outside in our portrait park, and they wanted the photos to represent them as the family truly is: relaxed, casual, and natural!
Our wooden bridge proved to be just a wonderful spot for their family pictures. Sitting casually together, their family’s love and bond shines from their portrait. The rich outdoor autumn colors create a perfect backdrop for their light-colored outfits. The young family seems to radiate light from the center of the photo!
Bryce and Evan had fun climbing around our old truck, and then lounging on one of our couches. Aren’t they handsome?!
Amy and Jesse knew just where they wanted to display their new family pictures. Amy wanted to update the current centerpiece of the family’s wall of portraits, an older family portrait. For those clients who are unsure where to display their family photos, we can help. Using our specialty software program, we can show them beforehand how portraits will look on any given wall in your home. All a client has to do is send us a picture of the wall. We can upload it into our special software, and voila! You can see what your portrait would like on your wall!
We think we captured this happy family as they truly are and can imagine their portrait hanging in the center of their wall of family photos. There is nothing better to display in your home than your loving family pictures.
As family portrait photographers, Ever After loves working with families from across the Leesburg, VA and Northern Virginia areas to depict their families through beautiful portraits.
Family Photographers, Family Pictures
Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, a mother-daughter portrait photography team located near Leesburg, 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
Which is Worth More to You: A Family Portrait or a Huge New TV? | Northern VA Family Photographer
Which is Worth More to You: A Family Portrait or a Huge New TV? | Northern VA Family Photographer
Hiring a professional photographer for family portraits might seem like something you can easily put off. You might be thinking of updating that big-screen TV the size of a Volkswagen to a new flat-screen panel. Maybe you’re thinking you’ll just buy a new iPhone instead of order pictures of your children. After all, you do have some family snapshots and plenty of other shots of your children. Why would you want to put off buying that snazzy flat-screen for professional photos?!
Uh, let us count the ways…
Documenting
A professional photographer loves to document. Stand in front of them and they will document you. It’s just what we do! It’s a passion every photographer has. Remember, very few photographers have become millionaires off their photography! We do it because we love what we do. With children’s photography, especially, professional photographers truly can make a difference. We have worked for years photographing little ones. There’s no buyer’s remorse with professionally crafted portrait art! Document your lives, your children’s lives, while you can. You won’t ever regret having a photo of your loved ones.
Creativity
A professional won’t waste your time. We know the best composition for any shot. We know what angles will work best with any given photo session. We have worked with many a body shape, subject, and cranky models (meaning, hungry children). We know how to pose everyone just right! We know how to keep the photo session moving with everyone walking away happy! We know how to create your ideal portrait. We don’t take quick snapshots. Remember, we document! A professional photographer will give you what snapshots or electronics simply cannot: Lasting memories on quality, archival materials rated to last 150 years!
Post Production
We’ve been extensively trained on just the right finishes, retouching, and editing so that you end up with perfect portraits. We have the patience for post-production to get all the photos looking great. We are well versed in using professional software. We also make multiple back-ups to all our files. We are perfectionists who believe we are creating something very important and precious for our clients!
Hiring a professional photographer allows you to capture your moments, your family, your children. At Ever After, we specialize in memories through our family and children’s photography across the Northern Virginia and Leesburg, VA area. We help you document and capture your memories now while you can – to have and to enjoy for decades and decades.
Will a flat-screen TV do that for you?
Family Photographer, Children Photography
Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, mother-daughter family photographers located near Leesburg, 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
Tip #4, How to Understand and Work With Your Photographer | Don’t Crop Out the Watermark! | Northern VA Family Photographer
Tip #4, How to Understand and Work With Your Photographer | Don’t Crop Out the Watermark! | Northern VA Family Photographer
Tip #4 in our series “How to Understand & Work with Your Photographer” is: Don’t Ever Crop Out a Watermark! Photographers, us and every photographer in the Leesburg, VA area included, will tell you to never ever crop out a watermark. And, we really mean never! To cut or edit out a watermark is infringing into some shady legal areas and, certainly, behaving unethically. Not to mention the disrespect you are showing the photographer!
Photographers don’t just pick up a camera, hang out their shingle, and open a studio for portraits. Just like the money spent on a college education, we have spent countless hours and dollars investing in our careers and education. We train and work exceptionally hard to develop our own brands and styles. We have pursued our dreams just like anyone else. And, like any artist, we sign our final product proud of what we’ve just created or produced. It is a disservice and disrespect to cut out our watermark for your personal purposes. If you cut out a watermark for personal financial gain, then you’ve just broken the law.
Sometimes someone wants to crop out a watermark to use the photo for their Christmas or holiday cards. We say leave it in! Wouldn’t you want your friends to see that you’ve had these gorgeous family portraits done for your family? Again, if you want to cut out a photographer’s watermark, we would say: Don’t do it. Just like writers want credit for their writing, and painters for their art, so do photographers.
We have been fortunate at Ever After to have nothing but extremely respectful and kind clients. We know, however, that other photographers haven’t been so fortunate. When in doubt, just ask! An informed decision is a better decision. As photographers, we are happy to answer any questions to you have whether you are a client or just live in the Leesburg, VA area. Just contact us!
Other tips in this series:
Tip #1, Understanding the Process
Tip #2, Don’t ask for more photos than the ones we present to you
Tip #3, Don’t Expect Free Photography
Family Photographers, Portraits
Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, a mother-daughter photography team located near Leesburg, 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
The Power of Portraits in Your Home and in Your Future! | Northern VA Family Photographer
The Power of Portraits in Your Home and in Your Future! | Northern VA Family Photographer
Years and generations from now, long after we are gone, who will tell your family’s story? Will there be a memoir or a scrapbook to say how you loved and lived, to show pictures of what your generation looked like? Will you have beautiful, fine art portraits to speak for you and represent to the next generation how you lived? As a photographer, we believe in the power of a portrait. Our clients across the Leesburg, VA area would probably agree with us about the power of a beautifully crafted image to tell a story – their story.
Our clients rely on our fine art portraits to capture their family’s images as a moment in time as much as they entrust portraits to recount their story many, many years from now to those generations not born yet. Fine art portraits taken by a professional photographer are a legacy our clients create today for tomorrow.
Oral and Visual History
Oral history remains as significant as ever in human history. It is a powerful medium for preserving a family’s history and culture. Stories are handed down through the generations of a family, creating a vital oral history of their ancestors, their roots.
However, we also have become an increasingly visual society thanks in significant part to the advancement of technology. Photography is easier, more accessible, and better than ever, both for the novice and the professional studio photographer.
Digital cameras and smartphones have changed how the general public takes pictures and documents their lives. Photography has also taken on a critical role in how families record their history for generations to come. Now more than ever, you can use photography to create a visual history to pass on in addition to oral history.
Snapshot vs. Portraits by a Professional Photographer
A snapshot isn’t the same as a professional portrait taken by a portrait photographer who is skilled and trained in the art of photography. Hiring a professional produces pictures that transcend ordinary snapshots and that are worthy of display as artwork. These are images that tell and preserve your story beautifully and eloquently well into the future.
When done exceptionally well, they become family heirlooms to be handed down through the generations. For example, think to any portraits you own of your grandparents or great-grandparents. How much do you treasure those images? Aren’t they considered priceless in your family and, thus, worthy of being considered family heirlooms?
Museum Quality Portraits
It wasn’t so long ago that museum and archival-quality papers were only available to, well, museums, archives, and other professionals in related industries. Today’s professional photographers, however, are able to use archival-quality photographic papers either on their own or through professional photography labs to create photographic art to last generations.
Unlike portraits from our great-grandparents’ era, professional portraits today are printed on paper you can trust to last for 100+ years without fading or damage. In the early days of printed photography, that luxury didn’t exist.
Display Your Family Portraits in Your Home
Storing portraits on a hard drive or disk seems practical to many people today. But to the professional photographer, fine art images stored solely on a CD or a USB seems unimaginable! It’s akin to wasting something personally valuable by stashing it away where it could be lost to time.
Why hide your story in a drawer where you won’t be able to enjoy it?!
Here are some points to consider:
• Displaying your professional portraits in your home allows you to enjoy them and reminds you of your family story. There’s more, though.
• Seeing your portraits every day helps create lasting memories – and keeps others in your thoughts.
• As we get older, we tend to forget things long past in our life’s story. The more you look at a picture, the more it’s committed to memory.
• So, those gorgeous portraits you display and walk past each day? The day will come when they are stored in your memory, and looking at them will evoke memories from that time in your life.
• How often have you looked at an old picture and remembered, not just the moment captured in the photo, but that day or the days around the photo?
• Have you ever seen an elderly person look at an old picture and recount the story or memory surrounding the photograph? A photograph can help your memory pull up other images long tucked away into the recesses of your mind. The tangible can help recall the intangible.
(By the way, there is some evidence to indicate that the more you focus on taking pictures during an activity or event, the less likely you are to remember that activity! Get a photographer for those special events!)
Today, Tomorrow and Decades From Now
Portraits in your home can be significant – both for today, for tomorrow, and for decades from now. Can a snapshot have the same effect? Yes, they can. But can a snapshot be enjoyed 50 years from now with the same quality? It’s unlikely.
A professional, fine art portrait, however, without a doubt can be enjoyed 50 or even 150 years from now. And, for anyone who saw it on a regular basis, that portrait will evoke precious memories.
As a family photographer in the Leesburg, VA area, we relish our role in helping our clients capture memories through photographic art.
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Family Photographer, Studio Photographer
Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, a mother-daughter photography team located in Northern Virginia and serving the surrounding area including Leesburg, VA. 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!
Photographers | Alexa, Carousel Dreams Portrait Session | Northern VA Family Photographer
As photographers located in Sterling, VA, and serving the surrounding areas, including Leesburg, VA and Broad Run, VA, we specialize in family and children photography and in creating beautiful portraits which you’ll treasure for years to come.
Every little girl loves carousels! Watching her eyes light up when she sees just the perfect horse for her to ride is such a joy.
Little Alexa put our carousel horse through its paces during her Limited Edition Carousel Dreams Portrait Session in our outdoor studio! She had a blast, and her mother got beautiful artistic and joyful images of her little girl.
Alexa also had a bit of ride on our flower-strewn swing fit for a princess.
Limited Edition Children’s Sessions
Our next Carousel Dreams Limited Edition Session is coming up in June 2016. There’s something dreamy and sweet about carousels. Young or old, we all love them! Bring your little lady to our outdoor studio for her own ride on our Carousel Dreams horse!
Although we are always available for family portrait sessions, we have special Limited Edition sessions with unique themes. They provide a fun and relaxed atmosphere, and are perfect for the little princess who enjoys dressing up. Check out our Limited Edition calendar and choose a special session just for your precious little girl!
Photographers, Family and Children Photography
Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy and Joriana Belcher Anderson, family photographers located in Northern Virginia, near Leesburg, VA and Broad Run, VA. We specialize in candid, emotional and artistic images.
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
Product, Mounted Prints | Northern VA Family Photographer
Product, Mounted Prints | Northern VA Family Photographer
We understand that when you make the decision to do portraits with a photographer, you are investing your time, energy, and your faith in us (not to mention your money). As an experienced, mother-daughter team from the Leesburg, VA area, we won’t disappoint you.
Mounted Prints
We are always respectful of our clients, and we value your business. We believe in developing lifelong relationships with our clients and having them regularly return to us. This is why when you select an Ever After product, we deliver it to you mounted only on the highest-quality materials. We don’t just print out a photo. We have it professionally mounted and finished. We want your photos to last a lifetime!
Gift Prints
As a professional photographer, we have spent years building exclusive relationships with reputable vendors and talented craftsmen to offer our clients the highest quality products. Even our gift-size prints (8×12 and smaller) are professionally mounted on styrene by the top-rated company in the industry. Styrene ensures that your image will not warp with time, unlike standard photo papers. Each mounted print comes with a lustre coating which protects the prints from fingerprints, smudges, and light scratches and provides a slightly matte appearance.
All of our prints are rated to last 100 years in a typical home display, and 200 years in dark storage.
To quote one of our clients: “The quality of the products is like none other that I’ve seen. You can’t get what they create just anywhere and it’s not something that you see every day. I would not know where you could go to purchase what I have because it is so unique. One of the things I loved about working with Mindy & Joriana was the custom nature of the products and how personal the service was.” – Deveney, Alexandria, VA
If you are looking for beautiful family photos from a mother-daughter photographer team in the Leesburg, VA area employing only the highest-quality materials, contact us! We are happy to show you some samples of our products. We are certain you’ll agree on the quality – and the beauty of our work!
Family Photographer
Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, a mother-daughter portrait photography team located near Leesburg, 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
Tip #3, How to Understand & Work with Your Photographer | Don’t Expect Free Photography | Northern VA Family Photographer
Tip #3, How to Understand & Work with Your Photographer | Don’t Expect Free Photography | Northern VA Family Photographer
Tip #3 in our series “How to Understand & Work with your Photographer” is: Don’t Expect Free Photography. From Leesburg, VA to Seattle, WA, photographers would say: Please don’t ask for or expect free photography. If it’s not offered, it’s probably not very considerate to ask. Dozens of hours can go into one client from the moment they hire a photographer through to post-production time. Asking for free stuff is asking a lot of a small business owner. Our livelihoods depend on our ability to produce quality work and be paid for it.
It’s not just giving away a digital picture. When a portrait photography studio puts a photo out there attached to their name, it represents them as an artist and as a brand. They aren’t served well by sending out a quick shot that has not been properly edited. Any pictures we send out to clients, paid or otherwise, would need to be properly edited.
If you are asking on behalf of a nonprofit, some photographers might be able to make time to help, but that really depends on their schedule, the nonprofit’s event date, and any number of things. Everyone wants to support a nonprofit, but it isn’t always possible. Some photographers are able to provide free services for a nonprofit event, while others will do it for a very small fee. Other photographers simply can’t afford to give up a Saturday night wedding to shoot a charity event regardless of how much they love that charity. It really all depends.
Again, going back to our initial analogy of the mechanic and the contractor, you wouldn’t ask them for free services or free work would you? It’s no different for photographers. While photographers chose their careers for a love of photography and working with people, most still have to pay their bills like everyone else. Asking for free photos or photography can put everyone in an uncomfortable situation.
We’ve built some great relationships and friendships throughout the Leesburg, VA area. All good photographers should build close relationships with their clients, and we’re proud of ours. We hope that our clients believe in our work and continue to choose us as their family photographer.
Other tips in this series:
Tip #1, Understanding the Process
Tip #2, Don’t ask for more photos than the ones we present to you
Family Photographers, Portrait Photography Studio
Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, a mother-daughter family photography team located near Leesburg, 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
How to Safely Hang Wall Art – Without Damaging Your Walls! | Northern VA Family Photographer
How to Safely Hang Wall Art – Without Damaging Your Walls! | Northern VA Family Photographer
It doesn’t take a photographer (or a rocket scientist) to tell you that we’ve all put nails into a wall only to realize that it’s either not a good spot for the piece or it is in the wrong place! So now that you’ve spent money on your cherished family photos, how do you hang them without damaging your walls? We’re often asked this by our clients in and around the Leesburg, VA area so we thought we’d put together some pointers! (Keep in mind that our tips are only advice and you should always use your best judgment or hire a professional!)
Location
It’s important to carefully select where you would like to hang your portrait photography. You will want to ensure the portrait fits well into the space. It should not appear as too large or too small in comparison to the wall space. Artwork that is too large for the space will overwhelm and look out of place. Artwork that is too small for the size of the wall will appear lost on the wall and will look even smaller.
Hang the portrait so that its center is at about average eye-level. Average would be eye-level for an adult at about 5’3” in height. People often make the mistake of hanging art way too high!
If the piece is heavy, you will need to insert your nail or mounting hardware into a stud to safely hold the weight. A stud finder is the easiest way to find your stud. Otherwise, the old fashioned method of tapping on the wall will do it!
Placement
Having a tough time trying to decide where to hang the portrait on a wall? Use a mock-up using blank paper. The paper should be the same size as the portrait. Use multiple sheets taped together if you need to. Now you can temporarily place your mock-up onto the wall. Then step back at least two to three feet.
Mounting the Wall Art
Measure, measure, and measure again. Mark where you need to hammer your nail or where your drill holes will go. Keep in mind that if there is a wire on your piece for mounting it will change where your photo actually ends up hanging. In other words, pull the wire to see how long it extends once it hangs from the nail. Build that amount into your calculations when deciding where to put your nail.
Tools and Materials
Use the correct tools! Picture hanging kits are inexpensive and readily available. Lighter prints and frames should be fine with a nail into the sheetrock (also known as drywall). A plastic wall anchor mounted into the sheetrock can be used if the piece you’re hanging doesn’t weigh too much. To be on the safe side, use the stud if possible. If you use a stud, no plastic anchor will be needed, but you should use the proper mounting brackets to ensure a nail doesn’t give way in the middle of the night!
Heavier pieces will need a bracket or picture hanger. Portraits heavier than 25lbs. will need to be hung from a stud. A nail inserted into sheetrock will not hold it! Actually, no nail might hold it. Depending on the actual weight, you might need to use special hardware.
Any photographer will tell you that hanging photos isn’t complicated, especially if they’re not heavy. With a little preparation, you can easily hang your beautiful family photos without leaving your walls with dozens of unnecessary holes! However, if you’re ever in doubt, it’s best to hire a professional.
As part of our exceptional customer service, when a client purchases wall art, we offer hanging services! We know how proud you are of your family portraits and how much you’d like to display them perfectly!
Family Photographer, Portrait Photography
Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, a mother-daughter photography team located in Northern Virginia, near Leesburg, VA. 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!