Hello again! As I mentioned in my last blog–this past weekend, I was working with a small business, Lillians of Anoka, to get the owner some fresh photos. She has hired a marketing team to come in and help her out with some social media stuff, and she is also planning to freshen up her website a bit. I swept through her shop and grabbed a bunch of images that I felt summed up the feeling of the shop itself. It’s always fun for me to go into a store and explore, while listening to customers chat, and looking through all of the cool stuff they have. (Without looking like a creeper. 🙂 ) I get a good feel for the shop’s personality, and then I go from there. Lillian’s is a boutique that specializes in unique clothing finds, fun jewelry, and cute accessories–I tried to grab all of that, while also making sure my images were creative, social media friendly, print-worthy, and easy to add text to, for website purposes. (Well, not all of them are easy to add text to. I always make sure I have a solid handful of them, which have lots of open space, that will work with text.) Also, fun fact that came up while I was shooting this weekend–Shawn Marie, the owner of Lillians, is a fellow Eastsider who also graduated from North Saint Paul High School. How cool is that!? Most people in the Anoka area don’t even know what an ‘Eastside’ or a ‘North Saint Paul’ is–let alone know where it is. (And, not to mention, knowing what individual areas to completely avoid around there. 😉 )

After I wrapped up there, I stopped in at Main Floral, and Sweet River, to make sure I had fresh, and updated, images to use this week in our blogs, and for our social media posts. I just got done updating Main Floral’s website–we’re now, officially, mostly, Valentine’s Day ready online. (I KNOW it’s early. I get it. However, for us, it’s our biggest day of the year. So, we gotta hit the ground running in whatever ways we can.) Almost every, single, photo on their website is an image I have shot over the past few years. (When I started, we had a lot of photography from Teleflora, and a bunch of stock images on our really, ugly, website. Now, we have branched out remarkably, and have nothing to do with the dreaded Teleflora, stock images, or ugly websites. ❤ )

Anyway, here’s a bit of what I came up with over the weekend…

And…here’s just some pretty, Valentine’s Day flowers, for fun. This is the image I’m using across social media to advertise our beautifully, updated, website. ❤