Actually this post should be called: Things I adore but that sounded kind of sneaky. But I truly adore mats. When we are in a museum or in a gallery shop where you can buy prints of photographs or other artists and I see one in a mat I am almost sold. Luckily I don't buy all of them but seriously I think there is nothing like a simple mat around a picture. It frames it, it is the finishing touch and it gives it a better feeling. Specially today when prints or digital images lost a lot of their value compared to years ago I think a mat gives the image value. That is why I really love so sell my prints in a mat to my clients. Everytime I ship matted prints to my clients I cannot wait for them to receive them. To see, feel and touch their picture perfectly finished in a mat.

Before I wrote the first part of this little serie called "Time and Life savers" I wasn't sure if anybody would read it at all. Thank you for the great feedback. With every comment and message about how those posts helped you and you started using one or several of those programs and that they saved you time and helped your workflow really made me happy I helped somebody with these posts.

So here is part 3 of "Time and Life Savers"

In my former life in an online marketing department of a big European cosmetics brand newsletter was a really big thing. We sent out four newsletters a month, with special days like Mother's day even more. When I started my own business I never thought about a newsletter. I choose Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to share news and keep my followers informed but lately I have the feeling Facebook is changing the rules every week and who knows what comes next. I really like to teach and to share and I think it is a pity if I cannot reach all the people who are interested in my tips. So that's when I decided that a newsletter is a great idea to share and to reach only the people who want to read my words.

This month Daniela came to my studio for a mentor session. It was exciting for me as she isn't a photographer but she is a great hair and make-up artist. We talked about all things social media, blogging, her new corporate identity and how to continue with a new website. Daniela got married herself in November so she wanted to start fresh with her new Name and a new beauty blog. I so enjoyed teaching what I knew to her on how to incorporate her personality into her business and how much of personality her business needs, about how to use different types of social media and how to start a blog and how to make it a continuous well read blog. I cannot wait to read her blog myself. When I see how she incorporated our mentoring into her other social media channels like instagram I have no doubt her blog will become a great one.

There have already been some posts on the blog about the Keepsakes tour in March and I promise this will be the last one.

Travelling with Justin and Mary Marantz and Philip Landerer for 8 days was fun, it was intense, it was good food and wine, it was a different Hotel every second night, it was thinking in two languages, it was five different cities and it was five people in a van. I enjoyed this intense time a lot and I learned a lot from those people traveling with me and the tour itself. With these images of our last day off in Stuttgart I want to tell you a little about what I learned and what really reached my heart these days.

When I started out as a wedding photographers and I didn't educate my clients about lighting and when the best lighting for their wedding photography would be I was often forced to photograph at noon with the sun at it's highest. And some timetables of weddings still just offer me the option to shoot with harsh light. So when we started this serie of videos in March we decided to break it into different parts as there a plenty of options to shoot at noon.