Its Official | Athens Texas Portraiture Photography

Cross posted at ROLP — although tweaked slightly for here!

If you’ve been following the ROLP blog recently and picked up on the hint in last month’s newsletter, a major announcement was forthcoming. I originally planned to hold off until September, closer to the two year anniversary of ROLP’s first official day in business, to make the announcement. However, since everything has proceeded faster than I expected, I decided about ten days ago to make the announcement today rather than wait any longer.

(those that know me know I’m not the most patient person, especially when I have a secret or someone is keeping one from me!)

So ….

As of today, June 1, 2009, Reflections of Life Photography (aka ROLP) has been officially been renamed Christina McCall Photography!

Why the rename, you ask?

The simple answer, the one that 95% of the few who were in the know for the past month have gotten in response to some variation of that question …

To be honest, I’ve never really *adored* the name Reflections of Life Photography. Don’t get me wrong, it defined, so to speak, what I wanted to do in terms of portraiture photography — capture all the moments in life for future generations and for those pictured to reflect upon in the years to come. When I was contemplating going into business, trying to come up with a name, and find a url/domain name, I just didn’t like the other suggestions made to me (or thought up by me). Reflections of Life was my photoblog name at the time. At the time, I didn’t want to use my name, as I was interviewing and starting in the field that my day job is in — which in itself will make sense if you know what my day job is exactly.

However, after two years, I feel a bit more secure in going with the obvious — my name. Clients who choose me to capture them are selecting me (I hope) because of both my work and what they glimpse about me and my personality and life when they visit both my business and personal sites. Additionally, there is no other Christina McCall Photography that I’ve located via google or any other search engine. The only ‘famous’ person by the same name was a Canadian political journalist who has since passed on. On the other hand, there was at least two other photography websites/studios in Canada and the northern US who had the business name of Reflections of Life Photography. Most of my search results (via my stat counters) were showing that more and more hits were from people searching for my name or part of my name.

So … now for all of the details of Christina McCall Photography …

Just in case anyone is wondering or worrying, Robby will still be behind the scenes assisting and second shooting. If I can convince him to spare a few minutes now and then, you can view his work over at robcphoto.com/blog as well in the coming months.

Our new mission statement/motto/tagline is pictured above with the new logo. For the curious, that is my handwriting for the CMP. Everything — well all my branding, that is — has been based around using my initials + the tacked on P (for photography). In junior high and high school, I always signed (when allowed) all of my artwork with the CM squiggle. So, inspired by a discussion on a forum I belong to, the new logo was born. It took about thirty minutes of being driven crazy with dual monitors and a wacom tablet the size of my laptop screen to get it just right (many thanks to Robby’s former boss for his assistance in that department!). From there, I came across the perfect business materials collection that I did some *butchering* to in order to make it fit what I had in mind. I will feature all of my new materials the coming weeks here along with the awesome photographer/graphic designer who created the original materials.

This has been a decision that’s been a good ten or more months in the contemplation stages before I finally listened to my gut and just went for it. For over a month, I’ve been working on the new logo and branding. Most of the new materials have arrived (just waiting on my logo stickers to make it here from ‘across the pond’!) and I’ve just about worn myself ragged getting everything done in time to launch today. A few things are nearly done — should be no later than next week when I leave for my trip! — but the major stuff was ready to launch tonight. The new portfolio site is one of those ‘almost done’ items!

Site: The new site (aka here!) looks almost identical to the ROLP one –except the logo change, new bio picture, and some recent additions to the banner slideshow (which isn’t working for some crazy reason, working to fix it!)! I will be retaining the reflectionsphoto.org domain until the end of 2010 simply because of all the WOM and materials out there with the information on it. After June 30th, the ROLP url will redirect to this one; until then, this message will appear in place of the blog entries.

Email: the ROLP gmail address/account will not be deleted. I have way too many vendor accounts in which it is my account login/contact info, so its still okay to email me at it. The new email is christina [at] christinamccall [dot] com.

Phone: The phone number will also remain the same — however, much to my frustration, after listing it on do not call listings after going into business two summers ago and having a disclaimer on my voicemail, I’ve received four calls from telemarketing vendors this morning/early afternoon before I could announce the change to my clients, family, and friends. So — if you call and get a long voice mail with a ‘please take this # off your list’ at the end of the message, apparently my requests and hangups with them haven’t ceased! Please forgive me for sitting through it!

Twitter: I will be phasing out the ROLP twitter account (http://www.twitter.com/rolphoto) and using http://www.twitter.com/christinamccall in its place. Follow me there as I will be twittering my upcoming trip (along with twitter only specials!) on there!

Facebook & MySpace: A new Facebook page for CMP is nearly done — anyone who is a fan of ROLP currently will receive a message to join as soon as I launch it. As for MySpace, I’ve really debated creating a new account simply because I rarely ever log into MySpace for the business profile or my personal one.

And — with that — please go see the new (and improved!) Christina McCall Photography! (okay, you’re already here!) A few promotions will be announced in the next several weeks, so add the url to your favorites and/or blog/feed reader so you can be on top of the news!

Sidenote: Rather than going through two + years worth of images on my external drives and cds/dvds to find the original images that are posted on the blog and re-watermark them, disclaimers will be posted in the coming month or two on each of the previous 266 entries with the new name change information. I’m also still going through the info pages and catching all the ROLP’s too! Thanks for your patience