My son – my one and only – is nearing his 34th birthday. Naturally, I have to tell him every. single. year. about the day he was born, all the circumstances surrounding it, but more importantly how that day changed my life. I took a lot of photos. There weren’t any editing programs way back then, and I had a 110 camera. As a single mother, it was so expensive for me to print pictures, but I have always known how precious these photos are and I wanted to have them no matter what they looked like. Well luckily, I am not a chronological scrapbooker (that’s a whole other blog post and teaching!) so still today I have photos of him to scrapbook from his baby years. Because of the quality of the product I used way back then, there are also some pages I need to re-do because of faulty adhesive. So I’ve got a long way to go to finish his first year book!
We are so lucky now in the digital world. We can take, delete, and re-take. I pulled out a page I have to re-do (the other side of the page fell to the bottom of the protector), and I wanted to share some reasons why I didn’t have to scrap every. single. one. of these photos.
Shane was a smiley and very happy baby, and I always wanted to capture every single smile, and every single face he made. As you can clearly see, some of these photos just aren’t very good! I know why I put them all in the book, but because I have to do this page, I know I can do a better job of picking out the best photos.
As you look at your photos, think about these things:
What is the message you want to journal about on your page? Quite frankly, I am all over the place with these photos. but when I re-do them, I want to talk about that little boy smile.
Eliminate the photos that are not good quality. I am going to choose to take out the photos that can’t be edited. I won’t be using the middle row photos on the left and right and the bottom row on the left and middle.
Of the photos you have left, what photos don’t match the theme of your page? As cute as it is, I won’t be using the middle photo in the middle row. I will save that photo to see if I can edit it and make it larger for a cousins-themed page.
Narrowing it down like that leaves me with 3-4 photos to use to tell the story of this little sweetheart, and I am really pleased about that! I have two photo apps I use to take photos of older photos. They are Google Photo Scan (and this can go right into Google photos) and I also use PhotoMyne for my oldest, vintage photos. Just remember that when you are scanning, make sure you have good lighting and no shadows.
I am so pleased about the choices I made to re-do this page. When Shane gets his books one day, I want it to be easy for his eyes to go across the pages, and I want him to find great joy in the photos.
I took a digital photography course some years back, and one thing has always stuck with me, and it will be contrary to everything we feel and believe. Don’t take so many photos in the first place, and you won’t have so many to go through. I gasped when I first learned heard that, but the instructor was right! If you are anything like me, you take photos and look them. If you find yourself with that perfect shot, why take more? That has been a process for me to learn, but I am really glad I did. Now when I take photos or go on vacation, I think about that perfect photo, and I delete the rest right away. That seems kind of hard-hearted for a scrapbooker to understand, but that perfect shot will make you feel the most. THAT photo that causes you to feel needs to go in your book as much as your journaling.
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