Handmade Wedding Gifts

Shot of Carissa and Randy during their wedding ceremony

HANDMADE WEDDING GIFTS

Shot of Carissa and Randy during their wedding ceremony

Wedding season is upon us! Whether you’re getting married or just attending, we all share the same burden: Wedding Gifts! Well, we’ve got you covered. Here are some of our favorite, unique handmade wedding gifts. They also happen to be from some pretty cool artisans! You can buy for your bridal party or take as the ultimate personalized wedding gift!

Unique Wedding Gifts

Laughing

Laughing Saint Fragrance – You want unique? How about a hand blended, unique fragrance? A great gift idea for bridal parties or gifts for the betrothed. With enough notice, they can even make a signature fragrance for your main squeeze.  

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Find and Beautify – What does every home need? F.A.B.ulous decor. Find and Beautify reclaims old and rundown furniture and turns them into amazing custom creations. They can customize almost any piece to meet your needs. Give a great wedding gift that will look great wherever it’s placed. 

Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest 

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Country

Country Witch Candles – If you’re looking for something a Magickal, these candles and oils are for you! Handcrafted with care, these candles will make a great gift and blessing for years to come!

Instagram

Gud Mood Essentials – Handcrafted, natural, and beautiful, these bath and body products look as fresh and clean as they’ll make you feel. Soaps and body scrubs make great gifts for a bridal shower and other wedding events.

Instagram

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Lisa-Peacey

Peacey Vibes – Custom hand-lettered signs, stationery and other gifts give the ultimate personal touch. Chalkboards, artwork, and notes are great ways to remember such an important day and make great gifts to tell amazing wedding stories.

Instagram 

Make sure you check them all out and show them some love. Most will ship, so even if you’re not local, you can still win with an amazing gift!

Stop Flashing Your Clients

Pretzels with flash

Stop Flashing Your Clients - Taking Better Cell Phone Photos

We live in a visual era and growing your brand means that you have to document and create images of your goods and services. Thanks to technology, it’s much easier to do. Whip out your phone and snap away. The problem is, we’ve moved on from the early days of the internet where a dark video or photo that’s poorly lit is acceptable. Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn have raised the bar in how we share our lives. Sure, there are issues with presenting a fake lifestyle, but that’s a post for another day. I want to focus on small business owners and the photos you’re using to market your business.

Pretzels no flash
Pretzels with flash

Nerd Speak

The nerdy stuff – 

  • Light travels in a straight line. (Rectilinear Propagation)
  • The only way to make light deviate is to put a dense object in its path. (Refraction)
  • Because light travels in a straight line unless refracted, it will bounce off a reflective object at the same angle it hit it. (Specular Reflection)
  • When shooting in auto, your camera will expose (adjust lighting) for the brightest parts of your image. 

What Does That Mean

It means that when you take a photo, the light your camera uses to “see” the image and make the photo determines how your images look. Soft light is always better. Ok, it’s not always, but, in this application, always. Because your camera both exposes for available light, it darkens areas that are underexposed or dark. Your flash makes one area of your image really bright, that is the area reflected back to your camera and the camera only “sees” that area. 

If you look at the pretzels above, the left image has no flash, the right does. On the right, the table is dark and there’s a big bright spot reflecting back to the camera. The pretzels also look unflattering and almost two dimensional because of such a bright, harsh flash. 

The image on the left, because it’s exposed for all the light, has more depth and is visually appealing. The entire image is properly balanced. Both of those images are raw and straight from the phone. Below are the edited ones. I used the exact same editing settings I do for all my Instagram photos that come from my phone. Even edited, the ones on the right look better, because the original image was better. 

Pretzels with flash edited
Pretzels without flash edited

TURN OFF YOUR FLASH!

Below are some flowers I shot here at the THINK Center, which while a gorgeous space, has some very harsh lighting if you’re looking to shoot something. Why? Because like most households, all the lighting is above and creates downward shadows. Which makes it perfect for making my point. Now that you know that the flash makes backgrounds dark, you can tell which ones have the flash on. 

The images with the flash, because it’s so harsh, lose all the detail and depth out of the flowers. Also, the color in the photos is dull and unappealing. I left these untouched because most small businesses that are posting aren’t editing their photos. While these were just off the cuff, which would you rather use to promote your product. 

Please, turn the flash off

I hope you find this helpful and it improves your social media posting and engagement. If you need help with your branding or content creation, give us a shout!