AROUND THE HOUSE // Planning a Photo Shoot

A few months ago I was asked if I wanted to participate in a Summer Home Blog Tour. There are so many bloggers that I admire participating in the tour and I can’t believe they asked me to join them. Needless to say, I am very excited and just so you know, the tour goes live on July 24th.

Since I have never done anything like this before I wasn’t shy about asking questions as to what’s involved, how many photos do I need, how does it work, etc. The key element to everything with the tour is to come up with a theme and decorate my house for summer.

My first decision is that I decided not to go with a lemon inspired decor. This summer there are so many incredible homes decorated with lemons and I just wanted to do something different. Not to mention the fact I doubt I could have come up with anything with lemons that hasn’t already been done. And it’s all so incredibly creative and beautiful!

I ended up choosing peaches as my inspiration. I am not sure why I used another fruit as my inspiration. Maybe because they look so wonderful at the farmers market. It was a close decision between peaches and limes. But the peaches won out… probably because they taste much better.

Next, I needed to decide which rooms I was going to include in the summer tour. That was easy. I selected our dining room, kitchen, family room dining area, back porch, craft room and our master bedroom. But I wasn’t sure how I was going to come up with enough peach decor for all of these rooms.

So my next task was to scour my house for anything peach. At first, I assumed that I had practically nothing. Turns out I was able to find a few things.

Then I went online and bought a few items on Amazon for under $20. And I went to Hobby Lobby and bought some of their faux flowers since they were all 50% off.

Then I went through the house again and found even more things until there was almost no room to put anything else!

My next step was to update all of my chalkboards with Summer sayings (using my silhouette machine to make a stencil of course!). It was time as my 4th of July sayings were a bit out of date.

I love the way they turned out!

 

One of the funny things about doing a photo shoot is what happens “outside of the shot”. See the photo above? Look at what was happening just to the right of the photo …

 Sometimes you just gotta move things out of the way in any way that you can!

Fortunately, I didn’t have to do the photo shoot all by myself. Two of my favorite girlfriends, Liesey and Mary Liz, came over and we spent all day staging and setting up the rooms. I would guess we spent 90% of the time staging and 10% of the time photographing. It was so wonderful to have three creative minds styling my house.

I bought fresh peaches and peach colored juice but we realized as soon as we moved into the kitchen that we needed more food items. My girlfriend Mary Liz ran to Trader Joe’s and bought some fabulous food items that absolutely brought the photo shoot to another level. I used my Ipad7 to take all of the photographs and it worked so well! The photos almost look like professional photos!

I wish I could show you the photos but I am saving them for the home tour. I do think they are AMAZING and I cannot believe how well they turned out. The three table settings are all very different and yet so much fun. I can’t believe how much I like the peach decor and I am so happy to have it all throughout my house! If you are not already, you might want to follow my blog (you can subscribe here) so you can be one of the first to see all of the photos.

I should probably mention one last thing? Those nineteen peaches I bought are absolutely delicious.

If you were doing a summer home tour, what would your theme be?

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