Update: Its currently a few days before our 2022 photo sessions, and there is one time slot available Saturday October 15th (mid afternoon) and two options available for Sunday October 16th (mid afternoon). E-mail emily@emilybeatty.com to inquire about booking a session.
These are always the most magical shoots of the year. Stay tuned for fabulous 2022 images in the coming weeks!
All Photography by Emily Beatty Imagery
2021. What a year. It was not without its challenges. Actually it was almost entirely challenges wasn’t it? Somehow, despite COVID and months of lockdowns, my mom and I planted seeds, grew flowers and a small business blossomed alongside them.
We are very fortunate to have had the resources and support to launch a floral business and build a tiny shop when so many other small business owners are struggling to stay afloat after so many mandatory shutdowns in Ontario since 2020. Its been a crazy couple of years. Two things we know to be true, more now than ever: FAMILY and FLOWERS can keep you going. It’s enough.
We hope our tiny shop full of fresh cut flowers and all the pictures I got to take throughout the year will bring a few moments of peace and beauty to your day.
You can find a great big gallery of flower photos from every month of the year by visiting Welcome To A’Daylia Gardens.
We’re immensely grateful for all the support we’ve received from friends and family over the past year or so. Thank you!
Wishing you and yours much love and joy in 2022.
Love from,
Stephanie (The Mother, Owner & Flower Farmer)
and Emily (The Daughter, Photographer & Social Media)
P.S. A’Daylia Gardens doesn’t have its own website yet.
If you’re not already following us on social media, we’d love to see you online.
Find us by searching Facebook and Instagram for adayliagardens
It has been quite a year or so hasn’t it?
The pandemic has been a really challenging time for so many people, and I’m no exception. Emily Beatty Imagery has been closed for the better part of 15 months. Now, at long last, there seems to be a path forward to reopen small businesses here in Ontario. (AKA I’m finally allowed to photograph other humans once again!)
I’ve had the opportunity to rethink the way I was doing a lot of thing within my business and my personal life. One of the silver linings during this time has been helping my mom realize her dream of opening up a small floral design business. She named it A’Daylia Gardens and its now up and running.
(Find more A’Daylia Gardens pictures here.)
So that means that I’m now available to book some photography clients and then ramp up toward what I hope will be a much more exciting holiday portrait season than the one we experienced in 2020.
Goals include offering both an indoor and outdoor option for holiday 2021 minis as well as taking on some new head shot clients and doing lots of outdoor family photo sessions during late summer and fall.
Are you ready to reconnect? E-mail me! emily@emilybeatty.com
P.S. You can also support artists like me by purchasing household art like this from Society6.com
Homemade dill pickles are a part of my childhood that I missed as an adult, so I set about recreating the recipe and making it my own. After five years of trial and error, I’ve finally perfected the procedure and I’m ready to share it with the world! If you’ve always wanted to try making your own pickles, or if you’ve dabbled, but haven’t found the right recipe yet, give this one a try. It is gooooooood and includes full instructions for safely canning pickles.
My husband’s biggest pet peeve is Internet recipes that contain paragraph upon cringe-inducing paragraph of personal anecdotes before you get to the useful stuff. With that in mind, I’ve created a concise, easy to find, easy to save, easy to view on a cell phone version of my famous garlic dill pickle recipe.
Let’s jump right in!
Do you know the different forms of dill? These are fern dill, dried dill seeds, fresh dill flowers, and dried dill weed. (From left to right and top to bottom.) I like to include at least a couple different types in each jar of pickles for a nice, well-rounded dill flavour. I’ve also been known to add dill flowers to floral bouquets for texture and movement plus a pop of yellow.
Now you know all my secrets! (Okay, all my pickle related secrets.) I hope this recipe works out well for you. Trust me, once you taste these babies, you’ll never want to go back to store bought pickles again.
Cheers!
This blog post is dedicated to my dear cousin, Cicely.
I left a little piece of my heart in Algonquin Park. I think everyone who visits does.
Our family is extremely lucky to have a cottage right in the park. Most years a bunch of members of the Merritt family get to spend a week or so at Rock Lake.
Nobody loves The Park more than Cicely. She spent all her childhood summers at Camp Wapomeo, eventually becoming a counselor and participating in canoe trips that would last the whole summer and take her from Quebec all the way back to camp. In fact, we did a fun styled session with a Canadiana theme to celebrate her daughter’s 1st birthday, two years ago. This year Cic couldn’t make it to the cottage because she welcomed a baby boy in June! Her family of four will need to wait until next season to revisit the wild beauty of Rock Lake, but I thought perhaps I could bring some of its majesty to her through these images.
Places Pictured in 2019: Rock Lake, Booth’s Rock, Lookout Trail.
Cicely: Rock Lake missed you this summer too. I could feel it. Think how sweet your reunion will be in 2020! Love you. xoxoxoxo
Each November I transform the home studio into some sort of insanely festive photo set for our annual Holiday Photo Sessions. In 2017 the inspiration came from Canada’s 150th birthday celebration earlier in the year. The result is this amalgamation of Christmas and Canadiana.
The best part of these holiday mini sessions is watching families grow up in front of my lens. Lots of familiar faces in this crowd!
Enjoy the gallery.
Want to see more?
Check out this 2017 holiday season compilation.
If you’ve been following along with my photography career even a little bit, you probably know I’m sort of obsessed with Halloween. Its my fav holiday- even though I hate horror movies and gory stuff and anything eyeball related. (I cringed just typing that last sentence.)
It probably goes back to my childhood obsession with playing dress up and perhaps the movie Hocus Pocus. One of my very most favourite kids sessions of all time involved a bunch of little witches, a real cauldron and smoke bombs. I just adore the time of year and the autumn colours and the wild outfits and pop up costume shops and the spooky home decor.
This past Halloween I brought the garden indoors, went hunting for a Beetlejuice-esque striped backdrop, and setup a spooky set for some styled sessions featuring little ones and some witchy mamas too.
Thanks to everybody that participated in these sessions. I always have so much fun doing these holiday setups.
These images tell a story that begins and ends in Algonquin Park. My cousin Cicely and I have always been very close, even though we don’t get to see each other much. When we do get together, its often just a few days each summer at our beloved family cottage in Algonquin Park. Cic grew up spending her entire summers at sleep away camp in the Provincial Park, and eventually became an accomplished canoer and camper, spending up to 50 days at a time traveling through remote wilderness with a close group of young women that remain some of her closest friends.
Five years ago (to the day!!!) I had the joy of documenting Cicely and Dan’s glorious Christmas themed wedding. When we learned that Cic would become a mother, right away, long before the baby arrived, we began talking about how we could possibly rendevouz at my place during the summer for a creative photo session. The logistics were going to be tricky. You see, my beloved cousin and her baby are American. They live in Cincinnati. Nevertheless, Canada holds a special place in Cicely’s heart, and we both wanted to commemorate her baby girl’s first trip to our mutual favourite place on earth- the cottage. At the same time, Canada was still riding the celebration from our recent 150th anniversary on July 1st. If ever there was a time to dream up a Canada themed photo shoot, this was it! We spent less than 24 hours together in 2017, but we sure did make the most of it. So without further ado, its my pleasure to introduce you to Cicely, and her beautiful daughter, sweet miss Louise. I’m so pleased I could capture their relationship and this special moment in our history.
Sending hugs South of the border. xoxo
So this happened. I finally did a dudeoir shoot, and it wasn’t even my idea. The boys at Pound Town thought it would be smart to do some marketing photos for their blacksmith business. Knowing what sort of photos I normally take for women, they also thought it would be funny to do some more… well, its hard to put into words. A little hot and a lot hilarious? You tell me. For the record, the one with the big beard is my husband. (Happy anniversary honey! This year I’m giving you the gift of Internet fame.) Hope you all get a kick out of this series!
You can follow along with Pound Town’s antics on Facebook and Instagram.
Last month, just before Mother’s Day, I attended a Mother Daughter floral workshop with the buds at From The Potting Shed, and the lousy weather didn’t stop my mom, my aunt Debbie, my cousin Alex and I from having a grand ol’ time– and going outside to take pictures in the rain. Earlier in the day we got a quick garden tour and then learned how to make spring twig wreaths and floral crowns. In between there was a catered lunch and some excellent photo opportunities.
We had a lovely time making our wreaths and crowns, but the real pleasure of this workshop was luxuriating in the ambience surrounding the French peasant gardens and the stone cottage that Elaine and the team at From the Potting Shed call home. Don’t even get me started on that incredible weeping cherry tree! Those pink blossoms totally made my day. Here’s a taste of all the pretty that went down at the 2017 Mother’s Day workshop.
Did you like the look of this workshop? From The Potting Shed will be hosting another very similar workshop called Fairies and Flowers on July 9th, 2017.
Want to see a complete gallery of images from this workshop? Visit my gallery website. Want to see another blog post showcasing flowers from FTPS? View my open house post.
Thank you for a beautiful day mama, Alex, Debbie, and all the buds From The Potting Shed.