Self-Timed Photos

A couple of weeks ago my sister and brother-in-law visited me. We did some sightseeing in the Marin Headlands, Golden Gate Park, and Big Sur. I took some great photos that I look forward to scrapbooking. It wasn't hard taking good photos because these areas are so incredibly diverse and visually interesting, and there were three of us to take shots of each other.

At the moment, I am at my family's summer place on a lake in New Hampshire. I come here every year, and I love this place. It's very different from California. Being here alone, I often face the challenge of documenting my visit using photography in more creative ways.

The day I arrived here was beautiful, sunny and warm, just about perfect. I struggled with a way to express this other than just taking the usual shot of the lake and mountains – lovely, but basically the same since I was a child.

Finally I remembered the self-timer on my camera. I positioned the camera to get a shot of me laying on the deck with the water in the background, set the timer, scooted into my pose, and voila! A perfect shot. I used the feature again to get a shot of me reading a book after the weather turned rainy.

I'll be thinking of other ways to use this feature during this trip and incorporate it into my bag of tricks. Yes, my layouts of my vacations alone can include more photos of me. This will be the Year of the Self-Timer.

Disappointing

A few weeks ago I took a business trip to Minneapolis. While it's not a destination that's ever been on my Top 10 list, I was sure I could find something interesting to see. And I did, actually more than I had time to get to. I did get to the Sculpture Garden and the Mississippi river walk to view the Stone Arch bridge, and I visited the fantabulous new Minneapolis Public Library. What I really, really wanted to see turned out to be the easiest to get to - the Mary Tyler Moore statue at 7th and Nicolette Mall. Being a huge fan of the Mary Tyler Moore Show that ran from 1970-1976, I actually felt emotional when I saw it. After all, Mary Richards (MTM's character) was my role model.

Unfortunately, I got no pictures of it because my camera wouldn't start up, and I wasn't able to find any postcards of it. Yes, I know there were other options - throw-away cameras or have someone else take the picture, but I didn't work really hard to taking those options.

This is the first trip I've been on in quite a while during which I took no photos. I didn't think it would bother me so much, but now I do feel as I missed an important dimension of the trip. Yes, I moved more quickly, but I still found myself thinking what would make a good photos for my scrapbook.

Even though I've had zero time to scrapbook lately and I still have photos to upload and organize and even more to scrapbook, I'll remember the next time this happens that taking photos is very important to me. I'll find a way to get them because now I realize how much having them means to me, and how looking at them brings back the memories so clearly.

Martha Stewart's Scrapbooking Products

I wasn’t a Martha Stewart fan until recently. In fact, I didn’t realize I was a fan at all until I opened up the Michael’s circular and saw an insert devoted to Martha Stewart Crafts. It’s not just scrapbooking, but other paper crafts as well. The scrapbooking materials were nothing real unusual, just nice-looking. I have to admit I’m getting tired of all the new things out there – it just seems wacky and faddish sometimes. Anyway, Martha’s markers and stamps particularly caught my eye.

I like that Martha stands for the common people’s brands, like K-Mart and Michael’s. She certainly has the clout to develop her own high-end lines of home and craft products. I've bought stuff from her product lines at KMart and have been happy with the style and quality.

Looking forward to going to Michael’s and seeing these things for real. The last time I was there, a week or two before I received this circular, there was practically no scrapbooking product on the shelves. I hoped they were restocking, and maybe they were preparing for Martha’s stuff.

Social & Solitary Scrapbooking

Got a few pages done at this past weekend’s National Scrapbook Day celebration. It was great to see what others are doing too. Julie, my CM consultant, is also working older snapshots. I like seeing what she is doing with them.

As much as I enjoy getting together with others to scrapbook, I find I don’t get as much done. I’m not one to chat and work at the same time. No problem – gives me a reason to balance out my social scrapbooking time with my solitary scrapbooking time.

Organization and Mindset

My new place has a large linen closet, part of which I’m using to store most of my scrapbooking stuff. I’ve been dreading organizing it, because it is mess.

Today I realized it makes sense to organize the stuff for the project I’m working on – select it and keep what I’m working on out or in the cupboard in the kitchen closer to where I scrapbook. So I did just that.

My current project is a heritage album of my great aunt’s snapshots of the family’s summer home. I selected a limited number of materials to use for this project and put the rest away, thus making the closet even messier. That’s OK because my mind is clearer about what I’m doing with this project. I have some great paper I’ll be using to add variety to the pages, rather than having everything just black and white and sepia. Muted colors, some old-fashioned patterned paper, a few stickers.

There’s still a lot of work to do on the project. I feel like I’ve been organizing these photos since forever, and in fact it has been years. It’s very important to me to let them tell their story in a compelling way. The usual way of organizing them, by year, was taken away when someone dropped the box that the photos were in. My aunt had them filed by year with index tabs, but not labeled. After some quite a bit of examination, I realized the photos were no longer in order and not necessarily in the right sections. Perhaps this will ultimately be a good thing, as grouping them differently could be much more interesting. It is hard to date some of them however.

Bringing this project to National Scrapbook Day now seems like a good idea – I was previously against bringing it anywhere. Also, I’m much more excited about the project because I’m including different paper and embellishments. It’s amazing how some thought and organization can change a mindset and improve attitude.

Color in Heritage Albums

Lately I've been scrapping my great aunt's snapshots from the 1920-1940's. I found myself telling someone that the interesting part was organizing them for the layout; the scrapping part was boring. Basically I'm using black pages, clear corners, and a few heritage stickers. After I said that, I found myself thinking, why not use a bit of color here and there? So what if all the photos are black and white?

There's a shot of my great aunt and her friend merrily coasting downhill together in a wagon, the kind kids use for towing stuff around (or did, in my childhood). They look so happy. That picuture speaks loud and clear of color - bright red or yellow. Why not? It doesn't have to be overpowering. I think the use of color here would enhance the photo and its story.

Gimme Five

A simple but practical article in my favorite scrapbooking magazine, Simple Scrapbooks gives me a new way to approach my pages. “Gimme Five!” by Margaret Scarbrough in the May/June 2007 issue suggests making pages with just five products. She shows five layouts that five different people created with this approach.

I love the idea and plan to try it myself soon. I often feel overwhelmed with the plethora of products I have and can get way too absorbed in selecting materials. It’s occurred to me that having no limit is a problem. A self-imposed limit of five items seems doable.

I did notice that cutting tools did not seem to be considered a “product” in this case. Products consisted mainly of letters, one piece of paper (that some people used only part of), and embellishments. However, one person used a sewing machine, which was considered a product but the thread used to stitch the paper was not considered a product. OK, now I’m getting anal;) - I can make up my own rules! Thanks, Simple Scrapbooks, for the great idea.