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Last week I took on a new role that is not exactly related to what Signify does tangibly, but is in the same family of creative communication. I became a local Golden travel writer for Examiner.com. This opens up a lot of fun creative for me, such as pursuing travel writing and photojournalism which are things I’ve had an interest in doing for several years now. So please feel free to subscribe to my articles if the content is of interest to you, and look for new ones each week!

In the meantime, I’m still trying to fit in the design of a new branch of Signify into my increasingly busy schedule – weddings! We’d like to have our photography featured on its own site, and we want to create a separate website to promote our wedding photography and custom correspondence for Denver-metro brides. The thought has always been to do this – have one website for business and one for weddings/lifestyle photography – but we wanted to wait a bit until we got more established.

So I’ve started the wireframes of the site but just haven’t yet gotten to the actual design. Probably because I keep adding on more side jobs like writing… But I’m trying to figure out whether or not to give it a totally different look, or keep some of the same elements of its parent brand.

Decisions, decisions.

- Laura

by Signify. Location: Tabernash, Colorado

Nothing could be more fitting for how I want to live my life:

“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast… a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”

From a speech to environmentalists in Missoula, Montana in 1978 and in Colorado, which was published in High Country News in the 1970s or early 1980s under the title “Joy, Shipmates, Joy.”, as quoted in Saving Nature’s Legacy : Protecting and Restoring Biodiversity (1994) by Reed F. Noss, Allen Y. Cooperrider, and Rodger Schlickeisen, p. 338.

Thanks to Frank for the insightful find (original via justinthomaskay).

In the end, worldly success is meaningless but living life to the fullest reigns supreme. I’m on board with that.

- Laura

For those of you who may not know, Ryan and I moved to Golden, Colorado this past November from the Chicago area. We absolutely love it here and it is the perfect city for our transition. It has a great downtown with a creek at the heart of of it and there is so much to do – from outdoor activities to shopping & dining. Not only that, but it has an authentic western small-town feel that is completely irresistible. And the location is perfect – we have easy access to the city and direct access to the mountains since we live right along the Front Range of the magnificent Rockies.

Since we’re outdoor enthusiasts and photographers, we can’t resist getting some “fine-art” nature shots on our walks around town and in the foothills – even if it’s just with our little Canon point-and-shoot. We admit we have an obsession with documenting everything, so you can imagine the amount of photos we’ve already taken now that we live in one of the most beautiful places in the U.S., if not the world (I believe I estimated our average to be 12 a day…in only four months time).

And I’d like to give you a glimpse into our life here and join us in our obsession. It’s a bit drier where we are so sometimes it’s not the most beautiful in panorama, but we love the variety in the details – rocks, plant life, etc. By capturing those tiny details, it allows us to see our hikes and nature in a totally different way.

So enjoy our nature walk on Chimney Gulch Trail!

Makes spring even more appealing, doesn’t it? Bring on the warmth and new growth!

- Laura