Business Profile: Bevilled Edge Photography

Suzanne Beville, a longtime Temple Terrace resident, has always enjoyed every aspect of photography.

“I can walk around a city for an hour and things pop out at me and I am like, ‘Oh that’s a good picture, that’s a good picture,’ and so on, even when someone else might look at me and not really see what I see,” she said.

Like many photographers, Beville started out by taking portrait-type pictures for weddings and other similar events. Her photography slowly evolved into taking travel photos when she started traveling around the country for her other job as a pharmaceutical rep.

She never expected what happened next.

“It’s funny how it happened,” she said. “People were seeing the pictures I took from trips, and they started coming to me with offers to buy my prints. There was a huge response; it was very humbling.”

After the requests started coming in, Beville focused solely on starting up her own online photography business. She created Bevilled Edge Photography five years ago.

“It still is surreal, really,” she said. “Photography is just something I love so much, and the response I have gotten is just amazing.”

Every year, Beville participates in local arts and crafts fairs to promote her business. This year, she will be participating in a few, including the Junior League of Tampa Bay’s annual gift market at the Tampa fairgrounds in November.

Beville offers a wide variety of prints on her Web site, including her popular “alphabet prints.” She snaps photographs of artistic looking letters that she finds in architecture and offers them in her shop for purchase. There is even a gallery with letters she has found in Temple Terrace.

“I started out taking pictures of anything that looked like an ‘S,’ because that is my initial,” she said. “Then I decided to branch out because I started seeing that other people were selling them, and I knew that I would be able to find some really cool letters because of my travels with my full-time job.”

She also lets her customers gather individual letters and purchase full words.

“People definitely like putting the letters together,” she said. “I get a lot of requests from people who are getting married in a certain city or people that are from a city that want all of their letters to come from that city.”

Prices for individual alphabet prints start at $5 for 4-by-6-inch photos. Other sizes are available for purchase, up to 11x14. The prints can also be framed at an additional cost.

A wide variety of other photographs are available, including “Team Word Art,” (a collection of letters that form names of particular colleges).

“My customers have told me that I am one of the only people they have seen offer the alphabet photography in color, including internationally,” she said.

Although Beville has a full-time job, she still makes time for her passion for photography, especially because of the reaction of her customers.

“I was at an art show and one lady was looking through the prints and she all of a sudden started crying,” Beville said. “It was a picture I took in England and the lady had just moved here from over there. That kind of response keeps me going and it is why I love doing what I do.”