Great Pictures - Great Pages What's the difference?

Sometime you take a picture, look at it and realise that it's something special. It might may still need some touching up or light correction etc but it has that special quality that makes it stand out. A lot of the time we take lots of pictures that fall into the category that I call "happy snaps". These are important because they record some special event,place, time or person but there is nothing in them that is visually appealling or eyecatching.

 These photos appeal to the person that took them but don't attract attention to anyone else looking (or forced to look) at your photos. Until recently I would have advocated using the ability to digitally zoom a photo within a frame to fill the frame with the person/thing that should be the focus of attention. I spent some time perusing traditional scrapbook pages and looking at the techniques used to focus attention on the subject of a photo in these traditional pages. Working traditionally with printed photos these people do not have the advantage of a digital zoom tool or any other digital techniques for that matter so they have been very creative with their scissors.

 A lot of traditional techniques involve cutting and framing photos creatively. SBC3+ provides extensive cutting tools for doing just this but we often use them in a very basic way. Even very simple techniques applied creatively can help make a photo jump out of the page. These photos provide just a few examples.

 Contact me if you would like more information on these techniques or come along to one of our workshops where you can get lots of assistance to master these concepts.

Salvaging Flood Damaged Photos

These comments are base on our experiences in Dalby in 1981 when we had water up to the window sills. We always look for a house on the hill everywhere we have lived since. Thought this might be useful information for anyone helping to recover photos that have been damaged.

Our wedding album was in the bottom drawer of a fixed unit that couldn’t be lifted and was forgotten about when we put everything else up as high as we could. We concentrated on electrical things and clothing etc and forgot about books in the study including the wedding album. 

They were under water for 24hrs and wet for a lot longer before we got back into the house and got around to thinking about things like this. A fellow darkroom enthusiast (nothing digital in those days) took them to clean them up. We thought we would be able to wash them as washing in water is the final stage of the print developing process. They had been wet so long that the emulsion was starting to lift from the backing so we just spread them out to dry. We thought that we could wash them later when the emulsion layer had dried out.  No so. No matter how long we dried them any contact with water and the emulsion still starts to lift. The good news is that after drying them they are OK. I have my wedding photos 30 years on. A few mud stains and a few white patches on some where the emulsion lifted off and was washed away but otherwise ok. The colours etc are as good as new. (My hideous 70’s brown suit is still brown)

The best advise therefore for anybody trying to recover flood damaged photos is to get them dry first and foremost. Anything else can follow later. As my friend Bob did for me, the best thing you can offer is somewhere that is dry and not covered in mud to spread things out to dry. Later they can be scanned and  tools like Memory Manager from CM used to remove the blemishes etc and reprinted.

We still look at our wedding photos (occasionally) and the marks have become part of the story that we passed on to the kids. We look back on those times and recall the friends that helped us.

I thought I’d pass this on because I’m getting a bit fed up with the doom and gloom in the media. “Everything is ruined” seems to make a better story than “It takes time but lots can be salvaged” particularly photos. 

Finishing a Project

In my last post I talked about how good it felt to think of an idea for a project, do it and see the finished result. Now I find myself back working on a project that I have been working on for nearly two years.

Why have I taken so long? Firstly it is a big project. This is the storybook of our overseas holiday back in 2007. It was a big event for our family and I wanted to make it special. We packed a lot into the trip and I want to record it all.

Secondly I keep seeing and learning new techniques to use in the software and I find myself constantly changing pages.

So why the sudden urge to finish it off and move on. It just needs to be finished before the trip becomes a distant memory and from a very practical view it's going to cost me money if I don't finish it. The vouchers I bought to pay for the project will expire at the end of next month - money is a very powerful motivator.

I've reached the final stages have been searching for a suitable idea for the first page. Here's what I came up with. A simple technique applied eight times over to each letter of the title. I thought is was a good overview of the whole trip. In order I have managed to include on the first page:- my home town of Aberdeen and it's characteristic granite buildings; pipers; salmon fishing; the thistle; the still in a whiskey distillery, ruined castles, drum major in full highland dress and finally Edinburgh Castle. Not a bad summary of Scotland. What do you think?

I've also been working on the cover and used the heather clad hillsides of the highlands.

There is still a bit of work to do but the end is in sight. Whether it is a short and swift project or something ling term there is lots of satisfaction just to finish a project. Even more satisfaction from seeing the completed project in print.
Keep printing your memories.

Finding Time

You know what it's like. Something you really want to do but you just can't get around to it. That's been the case for the last few year with some of my photos. I've had lots of projects that I want to do but just haven't got around to them or worse still started but not finished. All too often that is the case with some of my projects.

Well that just changed. The weekend before last it was dull and drizzling rain off and on. So on Sunday morning I thought cloudy day, means even light, no harsh shadows, perfect for photography. Let's take some photos just for the fun of it.

I recently jumped into the ebay/paypal world and purchased some photographic gear from overseas. Actually purchased from China, posted in HongKong (I guess that's China nowadays), and arrived with a Singapore stamp on the packet. Seemed a bit strange but it was cheap and arrived within a few days and it did what the description said it would do. But ... until last Sunday I hadn't had time to try it out.

So what did I buy? For less than $40 I got an adapter to connect my old lenses from my Minolta SLR to my current Sony DSLR. SO WHAT? you say. Well for $40 I can connect my lenses purchased in the late 70's to my fully automatic digital camera. The auto focus doesn't work, the auto exposure doesn't work (well not fully) and lots of other things don't work. But they never did! Cameras of that era didn't have auto this, that and the other thing, we did everything manually.

So what make this so good is that some of these old lenses have features that I just can't afford today. One lens has macro settings for extreme close up - check out the price of macro lenses today and you will see that it was $40 well spent.

So what did I do? I went round the garden with my 30 something year old lens and $40 adapter shooting all the interesting and unusual close ups of plants and flowers in the garden. Oh how quickly we forget! Aperture, shutter speed,ISO .....

But it all worked, and the beauty of digital is that if you stuff it up you take another at no cost. I spent a few hours with the perpetual calendar template and StoryBook Creator Plus software, added the images and a few personal touches and its done. Who says I never finish anything?

It arrived in the mail today and I have to say that I'm very pleased with it. The camera/lens combination worked well, I'm pleased with the images I captured and as always the finished product produced using SBC3+ is outstanding. The finished 18 x 12inch pages look great.

If you are keen on photography don't put it off. Go out and use your camera and print your images. Nothing beats seeing the images you took in print.

Something New

I have spent most of this past weekend working on SBC3. It is such a powerful yet easy to use software tool. There are so many creative effects available within the software and yet people always seem the find new ways to combine these and produce something completely different.

One of the best ways to find out about these new techniques is to mix with other users and enthusiasts to share ideas. There is alway somthing new to learn. No one is an expert some have just been using the software for longer than the rest of us.

Just this weekend I was revising a set of instructions for a particular technique when I found that I could actually reduce the steps by taking advantage of other features already built in to SBS3. I had seen the effect produced by someone else and worked out what I thought was a logical way to produce the same effect. After using my method to produce a number of pages, posters and calendars I found I could simplify things considerably by checking one box in the software options. Sometimes it pays to read the instructions and sometimes it's best to experiment. Do both and who knows what you can discover.

Getting Started

If you are new to StoryBook Creator Software (or maybe even a complete computer novice) then one of the biggest steps is the first one. Getting started. You perhaps saw a presentation, became enthusiastic about the potential and full of ideas for books or pages you wanted to create and share and went a head and purchased the software.

Now you are faced with the reality - where to start? You are not alone. I know many people that own the software but have not even opened the packet and installed the software on the computer. I have been using computers since the late 1970's and teaching people to use them for most of that time. My message to first-time users has always been "You can not damage a computer by using it. Unless you type with a hammer you won't break it" The only way to become a proficient user is to first become a user of your computer and software. Make a decision and get started. Don't expect it to be prefect first time.

One of the joys of working with digital media and Storybook Creator is discovering the undo key. If you try something and it didn't work as you expected then pressing the undo key will do as it suggests and undo what you just did. Then again, sometimes these mistakes lead to incredible creative moments worh keeping and repeating and sharing with others.

The hints and tips that I will hopefully share on this blog were discovered in exactly that way. Trying things to see what happens and adapting ideas that others have shared. If you have been reluctant to start then make a decision to 'have a go' and share the results with us.

Remember that help is always available. Share your difficulties in an email and I will be able to help.

If you would like to be able to create the globe on the featured page at the start of this post, come along to Memoranza on the 15th May. Details on my website