Turn This Season of Childhood Into
Heirloom Wall Art
You’ll Treasure Forever
At Dale Studios, we create timeless family portraits in Eden Prairie for families who want more than snapshots on a phone. As a trusted family photographer in Eden Prairie, we help you capture this season of life and turn it into beautiful wall art for your home before it slips by.
10 Childhood Milestones Plymouth & Chaska Parents Should Photograph
There’s a moment that happens to almost every parent I’ve ever met. Families from Plymouth and Chaska count on Dale Studios to capture these milestones before they slip by. It arrives on an ordinary Tuesday — while you’re watching your child do something completely unremarkable, tying a shoe or eating cereal or laughing at something…
How Often Should Edina & Chanhassen Families Update Their Portrait?
There’s a framed photograph in a lot of the homes I visit that I can date within about three years just by looking at it. Families in Edina, Chanhassen, and across the west metro come to Dale Studios when it’s time for a new portrait. The children are a certain height. Someone is wearing a…
Where to Hang Your Family Portrait | Wall Art Ideas for Bloomington MN & Chanhassen
I’ve been in a lot of homes over forty years of photography. I’ve made deliveries, I’ve done follow-up appointments, I’ve helped families decide where a portrait should live. Families in Bloomington MN and Chanhassen come to us with beautiful portraits and no clear idea where to put them. That changes after this. What I’ve noticed…
Extended Family Portraits: Multi-Generation Sessions Near Eden Prairie & Plymouth
The last extended family portrait I did before the matriarch of that family passed away was taken eleven months before she died. If your extended family is spread across Eden Prairie, Plymouth, and the west metro, our studio makes coordinating the session easy. She was eighty-three. The family had been talking about doing it for…
Preparing Kids for Portrait Sessions | Tips for Minnetonka & Chaska Families
Let me tell you what actually causes a difficult session. Families from Minnetonka and Chaska come to our Eden Prairie studio regularly, and the question we hear most is: how do I get my kids to cooperate? It’s not the three-year-old who won’t look at the camera. It’s not the teenager who said seventeen times…
Why Wayzata & Edina Families Choose Printed Portraits Over Digital Files
I want to tell you about a hard drive. Families in Wayzata and Edina ask us about this all the time. Digital files feel safe. They’re not. Here’s what we tell them. It belonged to a family I photographed in 2009. Beautiful session — three kids, a dog that wouldn’t sit still, late afternoon light…
The Heirloom Album: Why Edina & Minnetonka Families Need One | Dale Studios
There’s an album I’ve seen versions of in a hundred different homes. Families in Edina and Minnetonka have trusted Dale Studios for decades to create heirloom albums that outlast hard drives and cloud storage. It lives on a low shelf in the living room, or in a cabinet in the study. It’s heavy — heavier…
Interview Questions for Aging Parents | A Guide for Bloomington MN & Plymouth Families
My grandmother had a photograph of herself at seventeen — standing in front of a house I didn’t recognize, wearing a dress I’d never seen, next to a man whose name I never learned. Families from Bloomington MN and Plymouth have come to Dale Studios to preserve exactly these kinds of stories before it was…
How to Organize Decades of Family Photos (Before It’s Too Late)
The box shows up after a funeral, usually. Someone clears out a bedroom and finds it — a shoebox, a rubber-tub, a grocery bag stuffed with prints. Inside: forty years of a life. A wedding. A child’s first steps. A vacation nobody can quite place. Faces no one can identify because the one person who…
How to Include Grandparents in Family Portraits
In forty years of photographing families across the Twin Cities, there’s a conversation I’ve had more times than I can count. A family calls — usually a daughter, sometimes a son or son-in-law — and they want to schedule a portrait. And somewhere in the first few minutes, almost as an aside, they say it:…