Giveaway: Win Professional Photos for Your Party!

Kids Party

Photographer Central is the most comprehensive directory for finding and hiring professional photographers. It’s simple to use and you can find a photographer for any event in your life including kids or adult parties! Their site is designed to make your research process as streamlined as possible using filters that allow you to sort by price, style, genre, location, as well as an option to save businesses to a favorites group for easy comparison.

To find the perfect photographer on Photographer Central:

Specify a location and your keywords.
Start scrolling through all of the high-res photos.
If you need to narrow down your search results use the secondary filters that narrow by style, price, distance and more.
Once you find a photographer that you want to learn more about, open up their profile and you will find a full snapshot of that photographer’s reputation with recommendations submitted directly to not only Photographer Central, but also from Yelp and Google Business. You will also find the photographers contact information with the ability to message them instantly.

Are you worried about how you’ll look in your party pix? Here’s how to look your best in photos, courtesy of Photographer Central Pro Hari Simons:

Standing up straight not only long elongates your body, but it also helps you exude confidence, which is always attractive. Try pulling your shoulders back, chest forward, and extend your chin forward just slightly.
Getting photographed from below can add the illusion of a double chin so make sure the camera is at least at eye-level.
When it comes down to it, one of the best things you can do is simply relax. If you’re stressed about how you look, that feeling will come through. So just smile naturally and have fun!

If you have a special event coming up, Photographer Central has generously offered to provide one lucky Craft Gossip reader with a $50 gift card to use towards purchasing photography services from their site. To enter, leave a comment telling me what type of party you have planned that you want great pictures of. I’ll choose a random winner on June 24.

UPDATE: Lucky #7 is our winner. Thank you all for entering.

As if Diwali weren’t colorful and fun enough, The Festival of Lights: A Lift-the-flap Diwali Celebration by Namita Moolani Mehra, illustrated by Darshika Varm, makes it even more fun to read about with flaps and things to lift and pull to see more information or details in the illustrations.

The book is a story about a family getting ready for Diwali and what happens on the different days of the five-day celebration. There’s cleaning, shopping, crafting, food preparation and getting the home altar ready for the big day.

It covers decorating the outside of the house with rangoli, diyas and lanterns, buying sweets to share with family and friends, the sights and scents of the mandir (home temple), getting dressed up in new fancy clothes, the story of Diwali and celebrations with relatives.

Flaps (there are more than 140 in all) give you vocabulary words for different foods and definitions, as well as fun things like what’s inside the shopping basket or where the cat is hanging out. They also help illuminate the story of Diwali, which is the triumph of good over evil as Lord Ram defeated the demon Ravana to save his wife, Sita.

This pretty and colorful book helps kids understand what Diwali is and how it is celebrated, regardless of whether they practice it at home. This would be a nice book to keep in a classroom (it’s rated for kids ages 3-7) or to have at home to teach kids about Diwali even if it’s not something you celebrate. Where I live there are a lot of people from India so we are probably exposed to Diwali more than some other regions of America, but it’s a nice holiday to know about wherever you live.

Combine with the book Diwali and check out some fun lantern crafts and printables for kids to round out your experience.

About the book: 24 pages, hardcover, published 2025 by Wide Eyed Editions. Suggested retail prices $22.99.

Have you read?