West Hartford resident Deb Cohen has been taking photos of front doors throughout West Hartford for the past several months, and her hobby has gained quite a social media following.

By Ronni Newton

Photo courtesy of West Hartford resident Deb Cohen, The Front Door Project.

If you see a friendly woman walking through your West Hartford neighborhood, stopping to take photos of houses, it’s probably not something to worry about. It’s likely Deb Cohen, collecting images for “The Front Door Project.”

“What if people think I’m a whacko – taking pictures of doors?” Cohen thought when she decided to turn her interest in entryways into a social media project. “I felt a little funny at first, but no one has ever asked me what I’m doing,” she said.

“I’ve always liked doorways and windows,” Cohen said. A few years ago, on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, her husband joked that she could make a coffee table book of all the doorways and windows she had photographed on the island.

Cohen also likes to walk, and would always bring her iPhone 5s along on walks through her neighborhood. The two interests joined together, and she started snapping photos of doors she liked. “I didn’t start off with historical doors – just pretty colors, nice flowers, a beautiful neighborhood.”

In the spring of 2014, she formalized her combined hobbies into “The Front Door Project,” a combined Instagram and Facebook gallery of beautiful doors. The Instagram site (@thefrontdoorproject) is where she has the most followers – 1,626 at last check! She said that Instagram is really a better platform for photography of this type, but she keeps up the Facebook page because it’s easy enough to share to both at the same time. “People make fun of hashtags, but that’s how you find followers,” she said about her strong Instagram following.

Most of the doors she showcases are from West Hartford, but Cohen also includes doors from other towns in the area, her travels to Martha’s Vineyard and Newport, and sometimes will share photos that other door-lovers have sent her. (Check out a sampling of some of Cohen’s favorite West Hartford doors in the gallery below.)

Cohen used to walk only in her own neighborhood, taking different routes for her 2-3 mile jaunt. She’s since expanded her regular territory to other West Hartford neighborhoods, driving to a different starting point once a week for her walk. She usually walks about four times a week, and the one day that she works from home (Cohen is a finance professional with One Beacon Insurance Group) helps make her schedule more flexible.

To respect privacy, she purposely doesn’t location tag or even identify the street a house is on. Sometimes followers comment and identify the home, but she respectfully removes those comments and lets the commenter know why. “I hope people don’t see it as an invasion of privacy. I hope they see it as a compliment,” she said. “No one has ever asked me to take a photo down.”

She also stays off private property. “We’re lucky we live in a town where we can see so much from the sidewalk,” Cohen said.

Cohen loves that an ordinary home can look extraordinary with a focus on a beautiful entryway, but she doesn’t do much to enhance her own photos. All are taken from her iPhone 5s, but she’s learned some tricks along the way like that it’s better to crop after the image is taken rather than using the iPhone’s zoom feature. Cohen now uses the “Afterlight” app to crop the images and make some small edits such as adjusting shadows. She said the app makes it really easy to post directly to Instagram as well as other social media sites.

“It’s so much fun. It was originally a way to motivate myself, to get out of the house to exercise, but I’m just having fun with it now,” Cohen said. In the future, she said she would consider using some images for a calendar, maybe turning it into a fundraiser. She’d also like to take door photos in some other beautiful and historic towns such as Charleston, SC and Alexandria, VA.

Sometimes she takes 10 photos on a single walk, but she doesn’t post them all that day. She’s got a good backlog to post as the days get darker and the weather gets colder. “I will try to embrace the colder weather – will try – but I will definitely do it through the fall months,” Cohen said. She also may repeat some doorways she has already posted if they have a new look for the season.

She said people seem to respond most to colorful doorways, but on average her Instagram posts get anywhere from 150 to 250 likes. And although she has a core group of followers in West Hartford, she’s now connected with people from all over the world. About 30 percent of her Instagram followers are international, and come from a diverse group of countries including Ireland, Turkey, England, Russia, Scotland, Ukraine, England, Israel, and several in the Middle East.

What about her own doorway? She said she lives in a classic center hall Colonial, golden yellow with black trim that she said looks really good in the fall.

“Storm doors [which create terrible glare] are the bane of my existence, and we have a storm door,” Cohen said.

Cohen provided copies of a few of her favorite images. If you like what you see, follow her on Instagram (@thefrontdoorproject) or Facebook.

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