Footprints On The Heart – a New Website

If there’s one single aspect of creating portraits that seems to be more important than all others, to me it’s capturing the relationships between people.  After all, the richest person in the world would indeed be the poorest if there were no one that they loved; no one who loved them.

So we’ve created a whole new program for the studio to celebrate the relationships between people.  We call it Footprints on the Heart, a term inspired by a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt and a poem called “Some People” by Flavia Weedn.

Although Footprints On The Heart started out as a concept for a new portrait program for the studio, as it developed it became much more.

I”m a sucker for hearttugging stories.  I love the Hallmark Hall of Fame movies, and rarely miss one when they’re on TV.  I even collect the Hallmark commercials when I can find them on line, because I find them wonderful.

We sometimes give away copies of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books, one of my favorite series.  I’ve even used Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul as cirriculum in my high schoo age Sunday School Class, because there’s so many lessons within these books.

As a dog owner, I loved, and cried during, Marley and Me.  (didn’t we all?)

So I began to realize there’s real value in gathering and sharing heart touching stories of the relationships between people.  After all, these stories underly just about every portrait we create.  We’re photographing those in front of the camera specifically because there’s someone that loves them.  Very seldom do we create portraits for the individual themselves; they’re almost always for the benefit of those they love.

So the first expansion of the idea was the thought we’d share the story of each of these families on the website.  Like the family portrait we created of our new mayor Anna Peterson and her family; the very first time EVER that the entire family had been together, and it was created on the occasion of Ed Peterson’s 80th birthday.

Or perhaps the love story of how one of our wedding couples met and fell in love.  You get the idea.

But then, we realized that even those not currently involved in having a portrait created have stories to tell.  So what if we gave others the opportunity to share their stories with the world; tell others who has left Footprints on THEIR heart. 

So while the portrait program underlies the new site, it’s really about celebrating human relationships.  We’d like it to be a site that you visit when you need an inspiration, a lift, or simply to enjoy reading the stories that others have left.

To start things off, we’re having a contest for a $200 gift certificate to the studio for the best stories as voted by the readers.  Details on the site.  But we’re also putting together a bigger prize package for the favorite story of the summer, or the next 6 months; we haven’t decided all the details yet.

The address of the new website is http://www.footprintsontheheart.com.  We invite you to visit, and we hope eventually it touches your heart.