Diane Jarvis-Schuller

Storyboards are one of my favourite boutique items that I love to put together for clients. Besides the enjoyment I get creating them, they are a very economical way of having a beautiful portrait for the wall of your home or office. With storyboards there are so many different combinations in terms of design. The economy aspect comes in because, for the price of one gorgeous wall portrait, you can have multiple images on one hanging. They also make great gifts for parents or grandparents.

This storyboard is in the most popular size, 10×20 inch. As a reminder, all portraits (over 8×10) are ALWAYS professionally dry mounted on solid 2mm styrene. Professional photographers have portraits dry-mounted to ensure a truly quality product that will not wrinkle, bend, or warp, and will ensure longevity. Some people love them so much as they come, they display them on a mantle or photo ledge, but ready-made 10×20 frames are certainly available. Since I am a full service photographer, I will also do the framing for you, if you prefer. This style of storyboard also comes in a cute little mini, 5×10 inch size which is ideal for gift giving.

The deadline for Christmas delivery is coming up very soon so contact me today if you’re thinking of something as beautiful as this for Christmas. Speaking of Christmas, this year I have decided to take the entire month of December off. So I will not be working in any capacity during the month of December (though I will be available for New Year’s Eve events). I’m looking forward to time spent getting prepared for and excited about a good old fashioned Christmas, complete with lots of baking!

“Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.” ~Kahlil Gibran

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Photographs Never Forget! Keeping memories alive with custom albums and portraits.

Twas the day after Christmas and all across our land, was hoar frost and snow twinkling like diamonds beneath the sunny Alberta skies — and only about 12 below. How often have you read that I love what I do? I know, but I so love this job and most especially because of meeting really special people like this. But before I even had a chance to meet this delightful family in person, as I drove up their driveway and turned into their yard, I had to stop my vehicle to take this shot. An image like something you’d expect to see in a calendar isn’t it?

Once inside, all four family members were a true delight and with such warm, inviting smiles. The lady of the house has exquisite taste and has done an amazing job of decorating — a beautiful woman with beautiful taste. This recent addition to their lower floor is a hand carved authentic saloon.

A friendly game of poker.

Everywhere I turned there were so many interesting items in their home to take in and the laughter and warmth added to the feeling of home. And, as you can easily see in the next set of photos, despite heading outside, there was warmth everywhere this family went. Even if the sun had not been shining upon us that day, this family creates their own sunshine!

Maverick was enjoying the snow too!


Thank you N for having me out to your family’s beautiful country home. Yours and your family’s warmth and hospitality were the best! I hope you enjoy this sneak peek.

BONUS: As I do with all my clients, if this post receives 15 or more comments from different people, this family will receive a complimentary 8×10 gift print. To make it easy, use the [email a friend] link to share this post with friends or family.

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Diane is an on-location lifestyle photographer using natural light to reveal the true essence of people as well as their pets. Visit Diane Schuller Photography to view her portfolio and for more information. Diane serves all of central and northern Alberta, particularly Grande Prairie & area plus Edmonton, Alberta.

I’m so far behind that I haven’t posted some of the beautiful client products for a while. Here is one more sample of the custom Christmas cards that recently arrived. The back of their card is all red but I didn’t think it was necessary to include a visual of that. I am so pleased with these and so are my happy clients, right L & M? with a wink.

I’m still anxiously awaiting the gorgeous 24×36 canvas of these two beautiful girls. I’ll make a point of taking pictures of the canvas when it arrives. I have two more sets of cards I haven’t posted yet. I’ll try and slip those in shortly.

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Diane is an on-location lifestyle photographer serving Grande Prairie and Edmonton, Alberta and uses natural light to illuminate her happy clients. Visit Diane Schuller Photography.

Yes, I still refer to this season as Christmas. Not Xmas, not Happy Holidays, not Seasons Greetings, and no other generic terminology. Christmas is Christmas.

These are two custom cards I made for recent clients. I didn’t begin promoting the Christmas cards early enough this year but plan to have my act together for 2010. I’m pleased with how these two turned out. I have two more to work on plus a family that will be ordering some once they narrow down their image choices. These were actually easier to do than I thought they might be even though I’m using a template before customizing each one. I’ve also been creating my own title pages for client’s books and have become much more comfortable with some of the designs I’ve come up with for the book covers. Once I get caught up with everything, I’ll begin to post some of my design attempts (mostly book covers right now).

In the next couple days I will do my best to try and respond to those who have left comments since I’ve been away last week — slow but sure as the tired saying goes. The next post will likely be the one with my tutorial on how I make my designer envelopes. Since I’m so busy I thought I’d leave you with one of my favourite quotes — something uplifting and motivating:

“We are each gifted in a unique and important way. It is our privilege and our adventure to discover our own special light.” ~ Mary Dunbar

Here is to discovering your own special light!

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Diane is an on-location lifestyle photographer using natural light to capture her clients’ own special light! Visit Photographs by Diane Schuller for more information.

“Families are like fudge – mostly sweet with a few nuts.”  ~Author Unknown

Such a beautiful family in such a beautiful setting.



I hope you enjoy this sneak peek. I’ll let you know when your private viewing gallery of proofs is ready. Thank you again for such a fantastic weekend!

“You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.” ~Desmond Tutu
“Family faces are magic mirrors. Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present, and future.” ~Gail Lumet Buckley

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Albertans: As I do with everyone, If this post receives 15 or more comments, from different people, this beautiful young family will receive a free 8×10. To make it easy you can use the [email a friend] link to share this post with friends and family.

Diane is a natural light, on-location lifestyle photographer serving central and northern Alberta including Edmonton & area. Visit Diane Schuller Photography to view her portfolio.

What a wonderful Saturday I enjoyed capturing this couple and their family in Edmonton. It was actually their 10th wedding anniversary and they renewed their wedding vows. What a beautiful and loving couple they are. Oh and two darling boys as well.

Thank you Dave & Marcie for entrusting me to capture your special day. I hope you enjoy your sneak peek and I wish to thank you and your family for such a wonderful day and evening! I can hardly wait to show you the rest.

ALBERTA RESIDENTS, SHARE THIS POST: If this post receives 15 or more comments (from different people), the client receives a free 8×10 print! (To make it easy, you can use the [email a friend] link to share this post with friends or family.)
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Diane is an on-location lifestyle photographer in Alberta using natural light to capture your special memories. Visit Diane Schuller Photographs to view her portfolio.

Here is a sneak peek of a photo shoot I had the pleasure of doing this past weekend. It was a grand family gathering celebrating three significant family milestones. What a warm family and I felt honoured to be chosen to capture their special day. Have I ever mentioned how much I love what I do?  :)  This first young lady turns 90 in a few months!

This is a lovely traditional Norwegian Wedding Cake, kransekake. As you can see, it’s a work of art and a beautiful tradition.

There was all kinds of food all day long and Bison was a juicy, delectable feature at mealtime (as well as Arctic Char and a huge variety of tasty foods). I took a lot of photos of the details but this, after all, is simply a sneak peek.

This little gal ended up in a lot of images — she loves the camera! Here she poked her head out of an inflatable toy and, looking up at me, was a willing portrait study.

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Diane is an on-location lifestyle photographer serving all of central & northern Alberta & BC. She loves what she does and that includes capturing all your special moments. Visit her online portfolio.

This is a catch up sneak peek. I did share one image from this photo shoot a week ago and the clients already have their proofs online but I thought I’d share a trio from this one anyway. This family was so full of smiles and laughter; what a delight to photograph them on such a special occasion: their mother’s 95th birthday!

[caption id="attachment_1091" align="aligncenter" width="750" caption=""One very happy family -- look at those smiles!""][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1092" align="aligncenter" width="900" caption=""More smiles and one of those lifestyle moments.""][/caption]

Of course, I couldn’t resist sharing another photo of hands. I love the connection of youth held so tenderly with the character of an elder.

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Diane is an on-location lifestyle photographer using natural light serving Grande Prairie plus central & northern Alberta. Visit Diane Schuller Photographs.

{This will be much longer than most of my posts, due to the nature of the subject. I must also warn that this was written with my own personal views and, as you’ll discover, I have some strong opinions on this topic.}

As soon as we post a photo online, it’s out there, a sitting duck for anyone who may wish to do so, to come and grab a copy of it and use it for who-knows-what purpose. It happens and it happens more on certain sites than others. This is particularly important to be aware of if we are posting photos of children and you can guess why that is. In this digital world photos are easily manipulated in ways that I will leave to your imagination. I wrote a post earlier this year about protecting your online images and, if you haven’t read it, that may be an ideal starting point in realizing how often & easy it is to steal other people’s photos. You’ll notice that in the past year or more all the photos I upload either have my watermark or have the copyright © symbol attached (Notice how big and almost obnoxious it is? That’s intentional). This doesn’t necessarily stop someone from stealing it but it makes more work for someone who might be wanting the photo. I also have the right click disabled although people can still take screen shots if they really want to grab a photo. Even though this is totally illegal and against all copyright laws, people do this kind of thing everyday. I’ve already gone slightly off track. Let’s talk about posting photos of children online, specifically about posting them at public photo sharing sites such as Flickr.

I admit that I did post a few photos of children on my Flickr account. I never used to but earlier this year I began to think it couldn’t be that bad. Each time (and that was only 5 or 6 total photos) I did not add tags and was very careful about the title I attached. Why, you wonder? Because those creeps out there who are looking for photos of children to put on their website, to manipulate the photos in ways that are disgusting, search using the keywords many people put in their tags: child, children, baby, toddler, kids, bath time, girl, boy, and so on. Those creeps also go to public sites such as Flickr, in particular, because there are thousands of photos of children posted free for the taking, many of which are tagged. They can find them anyway even if they’re not tagged but they have to work a bit harder to get around that — but they do. When they go to Flickr, for example, they also head straight to the Groups where thousands of images in one subject area (kids, women, babies, etc.) exist and make it so easy to pick and choose whatever they want.  The reason I have pointed out Flickr is because it’s a known ‘playground’ for these people who steal photos for any purpose but that includes weirdos who want photos of children. They also know that there are public places (such as Flickr) where the pickings are easy and plentiful so they tend to go for the easy fishing holes. After all, why head out into the big wide ocean (or Internet) when you know there are these great spots where there are so many fish you can actually pick and choose?

So, if you’re going to stick with using a public photo sharing site, there are ways to make it less easy (notice I didn’t say hard) to access photos of your children. You can change your settings (but this is NOT foolproof) so the images are not public but only available to friends or family. It’s really important to leave titles blank or not to use titles that say things like “Timmy in the tub” or “Baby Brenda bare on the rug” — you get the idea. Avoid tagging the images especially with some of the words/phrases I mentioned earlier in this post. Don’t post images in Groups at Flickr. Check every single person who “follows you” or becomes “a contact”: if they don’t have images, block them; if they have questionable images, block them. Don’t post images of children posed in adult-like poses. I have seen two different ‘photographers’ on Flickr who have posted photos of children (theirs, I think) and they have them posed in seductive Hollywood-like poses — I’m talking toddlers and elementary aged children. It’s disgusting in my view but talk about tempting the weirdos. Or, you can do as I’ve done and remove every single photo of a child from Flickr.

Is there a safe online place? No. But if you’d like to have a way of sharing your children’s photos, why don’t you simply email a few to grandparents, aunts & uncles, or friends? Or better yet, mail a few prints to them. Consider avoiding these sites altogether and burn photos to CD and mail it to family & friends. If you really, really want to have an online spot for your child’s photos there are places that are less dense in terms of numbers and that require password protection. That is likely what I would suggest as an alternative to the public photo sharing sites. For anyone who has a Mac for instance, you can use the online gallery (MobileMe) with the password protection turned on (again, don’t tag them) and make the url available only to grandparents, relatives, and close friends. Also, change that password from time to time; don’t use the same one all the time. Password protection is a help but it definitely is NOT foolproof either. If you don’t have a Mac then seek out a place where you at least have the password protection for people to view the photos such as FamiPix, but there are others out there. (By the way my personal view is that I am adamantly against the use of Facebook for photos of any kind. But that’s a long topic all by itself.)

One quick note about blogs. If you post photos of your children on your blog, be sure you are (daily) checking your comments and those who are linking to you. Get savvy in realizing that many of these creeps attach themselves to blogs by saying things like “Love your site” “what great information” “I’ll come back” and other smarmy, flattering things. Many are spelled incorrectly, some aren’t using proper English (though some do), many use women’s names (that are surely false btw), but they are a bad kind of spam. Many of them are ‘feeder’ blogs (linking to you and linking to ___ ). Get rid of them! I have visited some of your blogs and have seen these in your comments; I’ve even given a hint in my comments, so hope the hint was caught. Be careful because this sort of spam is for sites that don’t respect children, if you understand what I mean. Don’t be flattered — that’s what they are counting on; check them out, thoroughly.

So now, some of you are wondering about why I post photos of children here on my photo journal. I’m not alone and you’ll find that nearly all photographers who photograph children and families, do post those images on their websites and blogs. These are harder to find for those weirdos out there because they go where the fishing is thick and easy. Would they or could they grab a photo from a photographer’s site? They could, but ours are harder to locate in terms of tags but also harder to capture (unless they do screen shots). It’s so much easier for them to head to those public places where they can pick and choose and help themselves so easily, I doubt they head off into deep water much at all. And then they have to get rid of the watermarks and so on … it’s so much easier to head to their favourite fishing hole (Flickr and Facebook public pages).

There’s more to discuss about this topic but I hope this gives people food for thought. Feel free to share these thoughts with others or to send the url of this post to others. Get a discussion going. Consider safer ways to share photos of your children. I think a lot of grandparents, in particular, would prefer to get actual snapshots of their grandchildren in the mail rather than those online glimpses. {Yes, I practice what I preach: although I do email a few photos to family, I regularly have images of the grandkids printed and send them in the mail! Who doesn’t love to receive mail?}

Recommended Resource:

“How Safe are Photo-Sharing Websites?” this addresses another important aspect of safety ( I recommend printing this article out and sharing the url with others so they can do the same. )

UPDATE (July 2010) FYI: The same principle now applies to posting photos on Facebook. Those same creeps who have been using the thick pool of photos-in-one-place for stealing photos of kids, babies, or women are now doing the exact same thing with Facebook. That is why I deleted my Facebook business page earlier this year and now only have a personal page for friends-only (and I have NO photos posted there either).

Taken at one of last week’s photo shoots.

“There is always a lot to be thankful for, if you take the time to look. For example, I’m sitting here thinking how nice it is that wrinkles don’t hurt.” ~Author Unknown

So many things I could write about but I’m so busy. A few things I’m hoping to find time to write about are copyright (again), printing your personal photos & displaying them (all those photos you have on disc, or worse — on hard drive), and important considerations in using online photo sharing sites such as Flickr (especially with the concerns relating to posting photos of children). Are any of these topics of interest or concern to you?