A few years ago in General Conference, President Thomas S. Monson quoted President Kimball regarding temple pictures:
To you parents of young children, may I share with you some sage advice from President Spencer W. Kimball. Said he: “It would be a fine thing if parents would have in every bedroom in their house a picture of the temple so their children from the time they are infants, could look at the picture every day until it becomes a part of their lives. When they reach the age that they need to make the very important decision concerning going to the temple, it will have already been made.” (link)
As my EC and I were deliberating Christmas gifts, we figured it might be a good idea to get a nice picture of our new Gilbert temple for each of our kids to hang in their bedrooms.
So we went off to the unnamed corporate Church store (But it rhymes with Schmeseret Rook) to see what they had. We found lovely framed pictures of the temple – from $100 to $500. Like that’s gonna happen for five kids. We left dejected.
Later, my EC began flexing her online shopping muscles. She found some beautiful pictures to download and more reasonable prices. But did she stop there? Of course not. She dug until she found Dave.
Who is Dave? Dave is Dave Anderson, of Gilbert, Arizona. And Dave has an Etsy site where he sells beautiful photos of the Gilbert Temple.
For $5.
Yes, you read that correctly. Dave sells his lovely pictures for five bucks. The same price as a Little Caesars Hot-n-Ready Pizza.
We were a bit skeptical, but we chose one that we liked – this one…
…paid the five bucks, and downloaded a high resolution copy. Did I mention it only cost $5?
There were no restrictions on the use of the photo, so my EC waited for a Zazzle coupon to come around and pounced. She had the picture printed and mounted on a stretched canvas frame – for around $30 bucks (16″x20′). Total cost, photo download, print, and shipping? Around $40. Finished product looks like this, only better than my photo:
Now I am not one to hype anyone’s business on my blog, but if you are looking for a print of the Gilbert Temple, you should check out Dave’s Etsy site.
My understanding is that he is not a career photographer – he works at Deseret Industries in Mesa, has a family, and serves as a bishop in his ward. It also turns out that this same Dave has been one of my Facebook friends and followers – the connection was just recently made.
Disclaimer: I have no financial stake in this – if I did, you can be sure the pics wouldn’t cost $5. 😉
Dave doesn’t know I am writing any of this – hopefully he won’t mind. I just think what he is doing is BonaFide, and should be shared. Here is how he describes his work: (I lifted this off Etsy.)
This shop is intended to allow those who wish to have unique photos of the Temple without spending a huge amount of money. You may send the download to your favorite printer (IE. Costco, Sam’s, Walmart etc) and make it the size you want, on the backing you want. My hope is that you will enjoy them and have something that fits your décor and style. I hope to be able to maintain my photographic equipment with these sales so that I may continue to shoot more photos to share and improve my skills as I do so. I live fairly close to the Temple so please check back from time to time and see what I have added. I will also post other photos as people request them. If you see a photo on my cdavespics facebook site, let me know and I may post it here for download…Thank You! Dave
Here are a couple of examples I pulled off his site as well.
There you go. If you need a nice picture of the temple, and don’t have hundreds of dollars to blow – here’s a solution. Happy to be of help.
I know some of Dave’s family. AMAZING people!! Truly a kind, Christlike family. I’m secretly hoping he’ll make a few trips south to photograph our new Temple when it gets done…because the prices in the unnamed store will never be in our budget.
Just lovely!
In Pres. Kimball’s day, we put temple pictures in all the bdrms. When the kids left home, they took their temple pictures w/ them, so temple pictures have been a little sparse around our house. When I looked for new ones, I was unhappy w/ the prices, so still haven’t done it. We actually have some nice pictures we took ourselves, just need to print bigger! That’s a good 2015 resolution, so thanks for the reminder!
Just a little jealous. Etsy Dave needs to travel the world. We’d like to choose our temples (outside of Arizona) for our rooms!!
Yep, we need Dave to come on up to Utah! I had the same experience trying to find a nice picture of the Ogden temple. To get the size I wanted was going to blow more than each child’s budget for Christmas!
I had remembered that talk and gave my son and 3 Gilbert grandsons pictures of the Gilbert temple for Christmas. I wish I’d heard about Dave sooner, but found another online source that was much more reasonable than the aforementioned store, though not as convenient as sending to Costco for printing. I don’t live in Arizona, but it’s my new favorite temple!
Dave is a saint in the best sense of the word. May blessings rain down on him and his family. And may many of your readers order one or more of his photos to seed those rain clouds.
Miracles happen when we follow the prophet! I had something similar happen after I heard that conference talk and wanted to follow Pres. Monson’s counsel. For those looking for other temples, lds.org has a lot of pictures submitted by others for use in the home and at church.
You rock!! Good deed done for the day times [insert # of Facebook followers]. T*H*A*N*K Y*O*U!! 🙂
Nice!!!! I’ve felt the same way about the store-that-must-not-be-named and their prices. Now, how can we get Dave to travel down to Utah and take pics of all our temple here? (Particularly Logan, Bountiful, SLC and Manti… “MY” Temples) 🙂
I was thinking the same thing about the Logan temple! These are great, MMM. Thanks!
I was wondering what he’d charge for photographing the Washington DC Temple. It’s still my favorite.
Beautiful pictures!
I love that quote from President Kimball, maybe because it brings back a memory of how obedient my parents were in following a prophet’s counsel. Immediately after hearing that talk my mom asked each of us what our favorite temple was, and within a week pictures of the temples were hanging on our walls. (Mine was Washington DC and my sister’s was the Swiss Temple.) It was years and years later before I learned that the mats she had around them weren’t real frames, but even that showed me that she was going to obey quickly, and not wait around until things could be done “perfectly”.