Sweet Eventide Photography iPhone Cases Available Now

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It is with great pleasure that I announce my new shop for iPhone 4 and 4S cases!




I have been working hard over the summer to prepare this new shop and I chose to launch it with five of my most popular photographs. I will be adding more photographs and device types all the time, including cases for the brand new iPhone 5, as well as cases for the Samsung Galaxy S III.

I have partnered with Case Mate as my supplier for these cases and I have been using a test case all summer. I can assure you that the cases are made with the utmost of care, they are very sturdy and it fully protects my "little precious." :) All of my cases will have a price of $40 and I will be shipping these out once per week on Mondays (for all orders I have received by then). 

I would greatly appreciate it if you would help me spread the word about my newest venture. I will be giving away two of the iPhone test cases (that fit either the iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S) with the ever-popular Loads of Ranunculus photograph on them! The test cases have very minor superficial imperfections on them that do not affect the functionality of the case. 

Here are all of the ways for you to enter the Loads of Ranunculus iPhone 4 or 4S case giveaway:

Pinterest: 
You can pin a case and receive one entry per pin for a maximum of five entries (five cases) Note: your pin MUST link directly to my Big Cartel shop in order to count. You can also follow me on Pinterest for an additional entry. 

Facebook: 
Like my Facebook page for one entry. Share the shop announcement for two entries. 

Twitter:
Tweet about the shop launch and receive an entry.  Note: your tweet must mention me in order to count.

Newsletter:

Sign-up for my newsletter for one entry. Receive one extra entry for every person you tell about my newsletter, receive a double entry if they sign up.

Blogging:
If you leave a comment on this post, you will receive one entry. If you blog about my shop, you will receive three entries. The post must include a link to my shop.

I know this is the most complicated giveaway I have ever hosted, but I really want to get the word out. This giveaway ends at midnight in Oregon on Sunday, September 23, 2012. Two winners will be chosen the old-fashioned way, with their names drawn out of a basket! I will verify the winners entries before shipment.

GOOD LUCK and THANK YOU!




Summer

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I have succeeded in my two summer goals: see more of Oregon and go camping more than once. We have gone camping three times and seen some of the northern coast of Oregon and some of central Oregon. This is one of my favorite photos from August.

September will bring grandparents who are relocating from the Bay Area! We are overjoyed to have Papa and Tutu moving to Lake Oswego. Equally exciting, we made it into a charter school and the first day is Sept. 5th. We are overjoyed to be joining a compatible school community again.

In the Moment

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Enjoying a magical moment at Cape Lookout, photo by Jeff


I'm forever battling the eternal planner parts of me with the life-is-short parts of me. I've been looking for those magical everyday moments all summer and trying to keep my worries about the future (schools, specifically) at bay as much as possible. 

Here are some of the moments I've found so far:  hosting a house full of loved ones, even amidst the chaos of cousins who were fighting one minute and giggling the next; the feeling of sand under my feet and a cool ocean breeze on my face; enjoying the warm, sweet juice from a freshly-picked berry; dancing to country music in the farm field with my husband while our son took photos of us; seeing how much our cucumbers have grown since yesterday; choosing the day's ice cream flavor; downloading more pictures from my big camera and less from my iPhone; these are but a few of my favorite memories from the summer of 2012 so far.

I have a greeting card on my bulletin board right above my laptop that I'm typing on right now:

Live in the sunshine,
swim the sea,
drink the wild air.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The everyday moment is all we have, really, in the end. Are you healthy right now? Do you have a loved one within reach? Do you have a song that makes you feel alive, a favorite food and a cold beverage on a hot summer day? Hold them all tight and memorize the feeling, because not everyone is so lucky. 



Pastel Sky in July

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I have been going on a lot of mini-walks lately. I have always found it hard to exercise so I'm operating on the "more is more" principle. When I think of it or the mood strikes, I pop out my front door for a quick toodle around a block, or two, or maybe more. Yesterday, this mood struck me just as the sky was soft and pastel and dreamy.


I know it's a rather abstract photograph, as far as my usual style is concerned, but this is straight out of my camera and it suits me just right these days. I have been very busy with visitors (yay!) and work (learning about licensing! yay!) and gardening (we installed a square foot garden, yay!) so to see a soothing, pastel sky helps me clear my mind.


Sail Away

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I attended my Uncle George's funeral on May 12, 2012 and that evening I dropped off his brother (my Uncle Bob) and his wife at the airport. The timing was impeccable as this is the scene that greeted me right after. Somehow it was just what I needed after a sad, emotional day -- I pulled my rental car over to this packed parking lot on the side of the docks. I couldn't find a parking spot, so I put on my hazard lights, got out and started snapping away. 

I figured anyone who needed to get by could wait a moment for me. The sun setting is such a fleeting thing, even though it happens daily. I wanted to drink this one in as slowly as possibly. 

This one's for you Uncle George.


The Next Chapter Begins

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an a-ha moment for Jess

I painted this little venn diagram for myself early in my Hello Soul, Hello Business coursework. We did a worksheet on dreaming big -- really, really big -- and I started out thinking about my business dreams. As I continued on the worksheet, I was asked to think about what I would do if I reached all of my biggest goals for my business? I had the answers ready to go and it turned out that they had nothing to do with photgraphy at all. Instead, they were my biggest dreams for me, Jess, my family and my life.

My husband took me out last night for a little bubbly to celebrate quitting my day job

That is when it hit me: my dreams for my life and my dreams for my business intersect within ME. I am my business and my business is me. It is a truly symbiotic relationship. It seems simple in hindsight but it was one of the biggest a-ha moments of my life (to date). 

And so the next chapter begins!


Things I am Not Afraid to Tell You

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I hope what came through in my last post is the message that I crave a balance in blogging, just like in life. I like the pretty, I like the real, I like the happy, I like the sad, I like it all mixed up, just like life.

"All is Well just the way it is; 
all weird and broken and wonderful." 
Mandy, on Little Brown Pen's post


I thought that was such a wonderful way to sum up the whole idea! So here is a bit of weird and wonderful news from me, something I am NOT afraid to tell you: yesterday I gave my notice at my day job of the past 19 months!


Do you know that I walk or drive under these trees on my street every single day? I look up through them and get all lost, so happily lost. I dream and dream and dream. Dreaming is but half of the equation though. It is time to act. These big, old, stately, beautiful, strong trees started out small, mere saplings and now look at them! I definitely see myself in these trees. With my husband's amazing support, I will now be able to grow Sweet Eventide into her fullest, most abundant potential.

I have been on Kelly Rae Roberts' email list for a long time and last night, she happened to send this image out to her subscribers:


Synchronicity! Amazing, right?!

Things I'm Afraid to Tell You

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Graphic designed by Ez of Creature Comforts

Have y'all seen this movement going around the blogosphere today?! I am exhilarated by it. I am energized by it. I am in awe of it and I am proud of it. I am inspired by it! Please click on the graphic to read the back story and see the full list of bloggers participating in this truth-telling spree. So far, I have made it to only a handful of blogs to comment and cheer, Nichole, Erin and Rena but I plan to make my way around the entire list. I am committed because it is so important to support this kind of heartfelt bravery and honesty in our saturated, perfection-inducing online world.

I'm going to get straight to it, but if you've read my blog for any length of time, I hope you have seen glimpses of this kind of honesty from me already. I have fought against making a perfectly pretty blog, because it's not true. Life is not perfectly pretty.

Things I'm Afraid to Tell You:

When I look in the mirror, I say hateful things to myself. And then I feel deep shame because I am a cancer survivor and I should be grateful to be alive and who cares how I look? Except, I do care. It's sad but true. I actually took "aging gracefully" off the list of things I like on my Pinterest profile page recently because I realized it was pretty much a lie. I mean, I love the idea, but I'm not living it right now.

Although I'm a Virgo, I am hopelessly unorganized at home. My files are a mess, especially the digital ones. I have over 25,000 photos now on my external hard drive. I cannot access them quickly, they are not rated or tagged with keywords or anything. I have so much work I could share and promote and this is a huge hindrance to my progress as a photographer. Don't even get me started on emails. I save almost all of them, I have five email accounts, it is ridiculous. It is an enormous, inefficient part of my life. Sigh.

I pick at my lips when I'm stressed or worried or tired. Now the Noodle is mimicking this behavior of mine which makes me want to vomit. More shame. 

I think the last thing I want to share is how lonely I have been since I moved to Portland. I really miss my friends and family and school community at home in California. While I have some community here (thank goodness!), I have felt very disconnected overall. As a result, I have developed a ridiculous attachment to my stupid iPhone. I check Facebook on it all the time! I don't even like Facebook! It is a real symptom of my need for a community. Not finding a school community yet has been a big setback in feeling settled here. I know this won't last forever, but I did notice it and it feels good to say it out loud. I feel like I read stories of people packing up and relocating and it's a breeze! Happy kids, easy transitions, no problems at the new school or making new friends and that has not been our experience. 

Oh boy, this movement is really scary! I'm going to hit publish before I over-think it because I love it, I love it so much. I feel like sometimes my tag line is a sham, "photographing the magic of the ordinary" because I don't find myself really showing the un-magical sides in my photos. I use a fixed lens with a shallow depth of field on purpose! So you can see the parts that I want you to see and blur out the rest. But sometimes, wouldn't it be nice to see everyone's dirty dishes, and not just their pretty coffee cups? 

I think we can take this movement to the next level with photographs too.

Are you in?

P.S. I deleted one thing and I'll admit it right now. It was just too much, I felt too vulnerable. I am human.



On Watermarking Photographs

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Good morning! I am having a bout of insomnia so I gave up on sleep and started tinkering on the blog. I hadn't really warmed up to the spring banner that was here, and I love my Etsy banner so here is a version of it for the blog. I have also gone back to a font I fell in love with years ago. I'm sure it's not web-perfect but for now, I'm going with it. I tinkered around with my laptop file folders too, and found these spring roses from Betty's garden in California to share with you.


Yes, I am watermarking my photos again. Let me explain, even though it might be self-explanatory.

Last week, I discovered another uncredited pin of my ranunculus image. This happens a lot on Pinterest, and not just to me. I suppose I consider myself lucky that no one (to my knowledge) has taken one of my photographs and added some text to it and then called it a day. Ugh! I've seen that happen. I'm flattered my ranunculus image is so loved still and it accounts for 25% of my sales over on Etsy. But last week's discovery was pinned by a well-known magazine whose staff member had repinned it from some random blogger, and so with their large audience, it's been repinned from them way too many times and with no link to me at all. It's really too bad that image wasn't watermarked, then there would be no issue. Good old hindsight!

I have wrestled with the watermark issue since I renamed my blog three years ago. I used to watermark and then I took some advice in an e-course to stop watermarking because "the big blogs won't feature work that has watermarks on it." At the time, I was eager for any possible exposure so I dutifully stopped watermarking.

And in a way, it worked just as predicted in that e-course. The ranunculus photograph was featured on a big blog, and they linked it to my Flickr where I had uploaded it. The traffic from that big blog to my Flickr got that image on the Explore page. And then it made its way around Tumblr and then over to Pinterest and well...here we are with a rampantly uncredited image floating all around the internet.

Now I am going back to watermarking my images. I do not believe I am a one-hit wonder with my photography so while I cannot really help the ranunculus image come back to me at this point, I am going to do my best to keep my future images connected to me. I have had many people find me on Etsy and say, "I fell in love with this ranunculus photograph on Pinterest and I had no idea I could buy the print until now!" Gulp. How many more of those people are out there?

Looking back, removing my watermarks was a fear-based decision. Now, if a "big blogger" wants to share my work with their readers badly enough, well they can certainly reach out and contact me. I'm very friendly and responsive.  It's not worth another ranunculus/Pinterest/Tumblr problem, that much I know. I guess all of this is the evolution of Jess the photographer and businesswoman.

Back to the fun stuff, what is blooming in your garden or neighborhood?

Glimpses

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I thought I would share a few glimpses of what has been going on this month, all via Instagram. I am @sweeteventide over there if you would like to connect. You can follow even without the app over on the website Statigram. Descriptions are at the end.








1. My wrapping on one of the little gifts I gave Jeff for his birthday 
2. My mini-me at a rest stop on the very long road trip back from Cali 
3. This caught my eye later on the road trip in Roseburg, Oregon
4. Portland's beautiful "welcome home" scenery
5. We had an appointment at the children's hospital after we got back to Portland. The Noodle
is 100 percent good to go after that awful CRPS event with his foot.
6. Our beautiful front yard tree saw a lot of action in the glorious spring sunshine this weekend
7. I always wanted to take take photos from the Burnside Bridge at eventide & Saturday I finally did!




Spring Pretties + Email List

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Recently glimpsed in Portland....




and recently glimpsed in California...



Also, I recently launched an email list which will include specials in my Etsy shop, new Sweet Eventide products, inspiration and exclusive images just for subscribers! I hope you will sign up, I will operate my list with utmost integrity -- no spam or anything icky like that from me. You can sign up using this link.

It's Nearly Spring

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Good morning! I wanted to share some new but quintessential photographs I've taken recently with you, because although it is still quite wintery here and we are headed to the snow no less, I know that spring is nearly here. I love rain and clouds but even I can't deny I am looking quite forward to the joyful energy of spring.


Portland is starting to bloom
© Jessica Nichols, Sweet Eventide Photography


Updates: the Noodle is walking, running and playing again after the past few weeks of work with an amazing pediatric physical therapist at OHSU Children's Hospital. He is not done yet, but the progress has been amazing and uplifting. We are headed to an extended family getaway in the snow, and we miss them all so much so we are very excited. Hello Soul Hello Business (HSHB) is still changing my life and I'm in the thick of it, and behind on the work actually. We are applying to charter schools for next year here; meanwhile we quietly began homeschooling about six weeks ago and we're quite happy with that transition. Mostly, I am anticipating all the photographs I plan to take as I document my first spring in Portland.

Thanks for visiting, I will be returning to regular blogging at some point as it has become very clear in my HSHB work that this space is of prime importance for me.

Much love,
Jess

Peaceful

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Ashland, OR -- January 1, 2012

Hello my friends! I have been wanting to come in and say hello this month. We had a lovely holiday season with our family and friends in California. We are enjoying having several visitors in Portland which is wonderful for us. We also have an injured little boy (his ankle/foot) so it's good I am still not committed to any extra things as the Noodle needs his mama. As for Sweet Eventide, I am taking photos almost daily with no expectations and much, much joy. I am enrolled in Hello Soul, Hello Business which is offering me the much-needed introspection I was intending to do when I began my sabbatical. 

I think of my blog often and miss being in this space regularly. Until next time, I wish you all a peaceful, beautiful new year.

Love,
Jess

Jessica Takes a Sabbatical

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Dearest friends,

It is with a sad, but relieved, heart that I am announcing a major sabbatical for Sweet Eventide. I have poured my heart, soul & wallet into my blog and Etsy shop for two-and-a-half years and it is time for a re-evaluation period.

I work Monday through Friday while my son is in school and trying to juggle my family and Sweet Eventide during the rest of the hours is not sustainable any longer. If I was making great strides in my creative photography business, I would be getting some return on the immense investment I have made into it. However, I am not. I simply am not, despite my best efforts.

The final straw was yesterday's artisan bazaar. I had such high hopes for this bazaar, what with finally being in Portland, where people love art and handmade and "meeting the artist behind the work." I was finally showing somewhere that had good foot traffic! That is what has been missing all along, I told myself for the past month as I prepared and prepared and prepared to show myself at my very best.


an iphone photo, not the ones documented with the rented Tokina 11-16 

I will be brutally honest here and tell everyone that I spent countless hours and over $500 preparing for this show and I sold $30 worth of merchandise. Yes, I even rented a fancy wide angle and marco lenses from my employer and took lots of cool pictures of my display. But it all ends with an iPhone snap.

My family gave up their entire weekend to help me because I was so sick. This is a business that has been bleeding the entire time it has existed. I may have a dream but I also know when I have hit my personal limits. I have only so much time and energy per day. I spend it every day as consciously as I can.

And I am done.

You see, lots of people did go to the bazaar and a lot of them came down and saw my booth. Most people l-i-n-g-e-r-ed over my display, oohing and ahhing over my work. I overheard wonderful murmurs like "beautiful" and "peaceful" and "calming" and other nice things. I even heard about my business cards -- "These are so gorgeous! You give these away?" -- as they took one and walked away without buying anything.

Why yes, yes I do. I give and I give and I give.


And I am done.

People respond so well to my work and some people have supported it with a purchase. Thank you to each and every one of my 64 customers who have supported my shop since it launched. But in a world overflowing with beautiful blogs and photography and handmade gorgeous goods, you don't really have to buy anything. You can get endless amounts of pretty for free.

And I am done with all of that. I've loved sharing my work. But it comes at a great cost to me. I know a lot of people don't talk openly and honestly about this stuff. I am going to talk about it. I can read every article out there about SEO and indie marketing and successful ads and social media and tags & titles and how to stand out on Etsy. I can, I have, I have tried and tried and tried.

And I am done.

I do not know what the future will bring. But right now I am taking a sabbatical and I am walking away. If you are here if and when I come back, that is wonderful. If you are not, I understand.

Thank you for going on this journey with me.

xo,
Jess

Jess Obsesses on Burlap Wreaths

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Good afternoon! We had a different, but enjoyable Thanksgiving holiday here in our new city, even though I've been sick for going on a week now with back-to-back germ sessions. We thoroughly enjoyed having the Noodle home from school for an entire week. The house is lonely and quiet with him gone today. I'm distracting myself with Etsy searches for rustic holiday wreaths because I want one and I'm not feeling very crafty myself at the moment.

 burlap and felt wreath by AquaGirlArt

I couldn't stop at one of course so now there is a fun new pinboard full of wreaths for you to visit. 

FYI: I have completely opted out of the Black Friday and Cyber Monday madness on Etsy this year. I put my heart & soul into those events the past two holiday seasons and didn't get a lot out of it. It is so saturated with sales! I'm hatching up a different plan to show some appreciation to my customers this holiday season instead so stay tuned for details. I'm busily printing & shipping calendars plus preparing for the Winter Artisan Bazaar coming up this Sunday, Dec. 4th in Portland. If you are local, please come visit me!

If you have any favorite wreaths you've seen lately, please share it with me in the comments (especially rustic ones made with burlap, twine, wood, etc. ) Indulge a gal! :)