I’m sharing all about our newest little endeavour working with local small businesses in today’s blog post!
Now that I think about it, that title might be a little misleading. It kind of sounds like we’re selling our house or having another baby or something, doesn’t it? Well, nope! It’s neither of those! 🙂 I just wanted to take a minute and share some news about a new little side project that Chris and I have started working on.
As you know, we love taking beautiful photos of rooms and various other useful/beautiful/both things to share here on the blog and over on Instagram. We’re also so proud to call Chatham-Kent, Ontario our home and we’ve loved watching all of the new businesses springing up in our community over the last couple of years. I swear, we’re going to be the pop-up market capital of Canada soon because there are markets filled with unique and interesting handmade items popping up all over town all the time, as well as new locally-owned brick and mortar stores. We’re also experiencing a bit of a building boom and the work being done by the home builders and other services helping to make those new homes happen is just really impressive. We have a lot of work going on around here, but it’s beautiful, quality work, which is really exciting to see. For a town that experienced a lot of job loss when several big factories left town about 25 years ago and a stagnating population for many years since then, these new developments are pretty thrilling.
We started to feel a pull towards doing something that would allow us to contribute to this movement in our hometown and also allow us to do more of what to we love. We noticed as well that a lot of the talented local makers and home builders were really working hard at perfecting their skills and their products and when it came time to capture their work, they were rushing through it, snapping photos quickly on their phones, posting them to social media, then getting back to their work. This is why they’re so good at what they do. 🙂 We realized that we could really help with the photo end of things and take beautifully styled, well-lit, professional photos of their work for them. That way they could easily share photos of their work looking its very best on social media and in other marketing materials, without having to spend a lot of their precious time taking photos. They could continue to focus on creating what they love and still have a strong Instagram game!
So Art and Spaces, our full-service styling, photography, and social media consultation business was born!
We’ve already have the chance to work with a few of our favourite local makers and I just wanted to share a few of the photos here because we’re really proud of how they turned out!
It’s been such a fun and different challenge to try to capture these different creations in the very best way, using all the styling and photography tricks and tools that we’ve learned over the last 8.5 years of blogging.
If you know a small business in southwestern Ontario who needs photos of their work or products, send them our way! Or just follow us yourself over on Instagram if you’re curious and would like to peek in on what we’re doing over there. 🙂
Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.