Tag Archives: Relay For Life West Bloomfield

Relay For Life West Bloomfield 2014 – Team Frameable Faces!

Relay For Life West Bloomfield 2014 was another successful and meaningful day for Team Frameable Faces!  This year we set out with a goal of raising at least $1500 to fight cancer and we are happy to say we reached our goal!

Relay For Life West Bloomfield 2014

Photo by Hala Eliya Photography

Our friend and member of our team Kelly Taylor who manages the Orchard Mall joined our family for the team lap at the beginning of the day in the photo above.

This year’s theme for Relay was “Relaywood” and every team had a movie theme.  If you follow our blog you may know based on this post we are big fans of Pulp Fiction so that’s what we chose.  Our tag line was “Cancer’s Dead, Baby.  Cancer’s Dead” (as opposed to Zed).  We had Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase at our tent which may or may not have contained the cure for cancer.  It’s still a mystery what’s in that briefcase…  We were also joined by Saundra Hood who generously donated her time for massages at a dollar per minute.  In the film a gangster who went by “Tony Rocky Horror” was tossed over a 4th floor balcony for allegedly giving Mia Wallace a foot massage so we stayed away from foot massages just to be careful – haha!  We also may not have had any Big Kahuna Burgers or 5 dollar shakes but we did have a Jack Rabbit Slim’s dance contest – here is a vine of our winners – the Freedlands!

Relay For Life West Bloomfield 2013 – Team Frameable Faces!

This was the first year we entered the Relay For Life West Bloomfield with our own team and we found it to be a very fun and rewarding experience!  For those who don’t know, Relay For Life is a community fundraising event put on through the American Cancer Society to raise money for research to find a cure for cancer.  We had donated in the past and Ally had attended several of the past Relays.  I have to admit that this was my first Relay, and now that I’ve been I don’t plan on missing another one…

Relay For Life West Bloomfield 2013

Photo Credit Hala Eliya Photography

Go Team Frameable Faces!

As pretty much everyone has, we have certainly been touched by cancer in our families and with our friends and so we thought it was time we did something about it – using our brand and our resources to try to raise money to make a world with more birthdays and less cancer, and for our first year I am happy to report we raised almost $1500.  Just so you know you can actually still donate to the cause for this year’s relay through August 31st if you like at our team page.  We had a few partners worth noting who helped us – we did fundraising days at Zoe’s House Of Pancakes and Leaf & Berry, and Hiller’s Markets donated fruit which we made into fruit kebobs and sold at the Team Frameable Faces tent at the Relay.

Disclaimer – the following photos were snapped with a Droid and are of varying quality, but they are included here to tell the story of the day.

We started with a fruit kebob-making party here at the studio Friday night June 7th…

Relay For Life West Bloomfield 2013

Fruit Kebob Party!

Relay For Life West Bloomfield 2013

Joel Ben-Moche cuts up some watermelon! Yum!

 

Then Saturday morning started the Relay with the walk of the survivors…

Relay For Life West Bloomfield 2013

Walk of cancer survivors

We spent the day manning the Frameable Faces tent with our team!

Relay For Life West Bloomfield 2013

Fruit Kebobs!!! Get your fruit kebobs here!!!

Relay For Life West Bloomfield 2013

Frameable Faces Senior Carly Simko shows off her awesome decorations!

Relay For Life West Bloomfield 2013

JC Sidaway sells origami canoes to raise money to fight cancer!

Several dignitaries came to the event including Senator Debbie Stabenow…

Relay For Life West Bloomfield 2013

Senator Stabenow addresses the crowd

Okay this was amazing….  on a day when people spent a lot of time remembering those who lost their battles with cancer an amazing rainbow circle around the sun appeared directly above the event….

Relay For Life West Bloomfield 2013

Incredible

We then decorated luminaria bags in memory of those we’ve lost, and then the entire track was ringed with lit bags at night time while everyone walked a lap in silence.  An extremely touching and powerful moment.

Relay For Life West Bloomfield 2013

Team Frameable Faces luminaria bags

Relay For Life West Bloomfield 2013

Luminaria bags lit with candles

Parting Comments

The Relay is a 24 hour event and Ally and I spent about 17 hours there.  Now that I’ve done it I get how special it is.  I don’t have a good reason why I hadn’t been before.  There was a nice turnout of people, but frankly there weren’t enough.  There is no good reason or excuse for not going to your local Relay For Life.  You don’t have to have the means to donate huge chunks of money in order to attend.  No one will hound you to give.  But you certainly can give, and you can certainly support the cause even if it’s in spirit.  Even if you just come hungry and eat at the Relay – every bit helps.  You will see a ton of people you know and you will feel a really nice sense of community.  As for Team Frameable Faces this year was a good start but we can absolutely do better.  We truly hope you will join us next year as we come together again to CELEBRATE, REMEMBER, and FIGHT BACK!

 

 

 

Doug’s Photography and Social Media Rant – May 31, 2013

Doug's RantIt’s been an interesting week or so in photography and social media – from a certain Internet-based company CEO’s assault on professional photographers, to facebook’s announcement (finally) of verified accounts.  A couple of interesting nuggets happened here at Frameable Faces as well, so while I’m not sure if this is something I’ll do weekly or monthly (or ever again haha), I thought a little column about various current events as they relate to our business, the photography industry, and social media might be a good idea.

Not feeling so “yahoo” about Yahoo.

We haven’t used Tumblr or Flickr before so while Yahoo acquiring Tumblr and making changes to Flickr didn’t affect us, the comments Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer made during the announcement that “there’s no such thing, really, as professional photographers…” caught our attention a little.  I watched the news conference and while I don’t like the stuffy overly “professional” suit and tie approach in corporate America, I also think your CEO should sound slightly more articulate than this person.  I was not impressed.  Scott Bourne has shredded her and she is treating him like some random troll to be ignored.  Scott Bourne is a very influential professional photographer (maybe that’s why she hasn’t heard of him) and I believe her comments and her subsequent non-apology will come back to bite her.

Facebookus Promotionus Interruptus

We pride ourselves on being pretty savvy when it comes to social media – we try to do it the right way and follow the written rules and (more importantly) the unwritten rules, but we still make mistakes and we are still learning.  Heck, there is something new to learn every day if not every hour.  For example we got tripped up last week in some changes to facebook terms that we were unaware of.

Email notification from facebook

I must say I find this “no more than 20% text” policy a little arbitrary and bizarre.  We spent 5 dollars to promote a fundraiser for Relay For Life West Bloomfield.  We created it as an “event” on facebook, and there is an option to add an event cover photo.  The dimensions for this cover photo are 714×264 while the standard timeline photo is 851×315.  Not sure why the slight difference here other than to encourage users to create unique content for your event different from your timeline photo?  Fine – makes sense I guess.  Logically I figured I’d keep it simple and include the three logos of the participating entities with a simple phrase “Let’s Help Defeat Cancer!”.  When we created the graphic we didn’t think it represented a call to action with phone numbers, websites etc. which we thought must have been the issue when we received the email.  However it turns out that facebook “quietly” updated their terms on March 6th to allow for calls to action so that wouldn’t have been a problem.  The problem is this new 20% text policy, which I’m fine with when it comes to a timeline cover for your brand, but isn’t an event by nature a call to action which requires a little bit of text to announce the event?  They let me keep the cover photo up, they just wouldn’t let me promote the event.  I didn’t think my promoted post was going to include the cover photo in it anyway so I’m still a little confused.  Weird…  No biggie – I suppose this year (our first year at the Relay For Life) we can take some photos and next year include those as a collage for the cover photo for any fundraiser events we are doing.  That will look better anyway than this quickie we put together this year…  While I’m at it, here is the link to our team page if you want to donate to help us fight cancer.

Relay For Life Fundraiser - Facebook photo

Our event cover photo which violated the new 20% text rule....

 

Yes This Is The Real Doug Cohen

I must admit that there have been times when I’ve had to do a double take on fake facebook profiles of famous people – wondering if it’s really them.  Some of the fakes are obvious and some can fool you even if it’s just for a second.  With twitter you always knew because of the little “verified” check next to the profile.  This is finally coming to facebook and facebook will determine who gets the verified label.  First will be celebrities and public figures but eventually it will come to highly followed people and pages.  I’m wondering since the limit for personal friends is 5000 for everybody what the threshold will be for personal verification.  Pick me!!! Pick me!!!  I wanna BE somebody!!!  😉

Other quick hits…

  • Really want Vine to be released for Droid!  Hurry up Vine developers!!!  Thinking this could be a cool platform for Frameable Faces and this seems to be taking forever…
  • I’m becoming more active on Yelp (yes this is a link directly to my profile) as a way to connect with people – spend some time there – you’ll see what I mean.
  • Had a really nice genuine interaction on twitter (I know right?) with a charming Australian tweeter I met named Susan Israel.  Reflecto was a little snarky to her of course (remember he tweets) but she took it in stride.  You should follow her at @bondi_izzy.