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When creating your scrapbook pages consider adding some non-traditional embellishments like jewels and beads.

Creative scrapbook crafters are always looking for unique or different ways to spruce up their pages.  This may mean reaching outside the box as they say.  There are what are considered non-traditional materials one can use to add that little something to their pages.  Beads and jewels are one of these non-traditional elements you can use to bring a new or different look to your projects.

One of the drawbacks to using beads and jewels has to do with the bulk or thickness some beads and jewels have.  If you are looking to reduce this concern, select thinner items to complete your pages.  There is a plethora of beads and jewels to choose from.  Many craft stores have a large selection of material for you to select from.  Don’t forget the online options too.

Beads and jewels are produced in different materials: acrylic & plastic, glass, pearls, metal, shells, seeds and wood to name a few.  They are produced in different shapes and sizes: alphabet, charms, designer styles, gemstones, holiday & seasonal.  Beads and jewels come in varying colors as well.

Attaching them to your scrapbook pages is relatively easy.  Some of the beads and jewels have a sticky backing on one side which only requires peeling the backing off and placing the item where you’d like to be on your project.  Where there is no adhesive on the bead or jewel use glue dots or a double sided acid free tape to attach them to your page.

Because of the variety of shapes, sizes and colors of these non-traditional embellishments, you have the ability to use them where you want them–as an addition to another embellishment, or as individual independent touches.  As examples, you could use a gemstone as the center of a flower, or create a flower using various falter beads, etc.  Let your own creative juices guide you.

Here are a couple of online suppliers of beads and jewels:

Joann.com

Amazon.com

CreateforLess.com

Beadbee.com

Michaels.com

Let’s face it, taking photographs for inclusion in a scrapbook generally come from the regular snapshots we take a parties, gatherings and candid snaps as they occur.  There are times, however, when you want to have a really good picture of an individual that we might consider portrait quality.  Here are some tips to help you shoot some winning photographs you might consider a step above the regular shots you take at a birthday party.  These tips on lighting, backgrounds, and other important elements will help you take those special pictures.  Your photographs will help tell the story you want them to tell.

Have A Plan Of What You Want To Capture Before You Start

Know what you want to accomplish before you drag you camera out to begin taking your photos.  Ask yourself, what is the story I want to tell with these photographs–or this single snapshot.  This may give you ideas of how to have your subject dress, determine what props, if any, you think will help you tell your story.  You may have to try a couple different props, including familiar toys or objects which help identify who the subject is, and clothing outfits,  to see what works best to bring the beauty and identity of your subject.  Change them to find the one you feel works best for you project.  This extra effort can enhance your images and make them truly reflective of your subject person.

Use A Draped Background

A simple background set 3′ to 4′ behind your subject can help enhance your pictures.  You’re looking to create a photograph of your subject with the backdrop or background to make your subject the focus of your photo.  Use some plain cloth you may have around the house: sheets in various colors, blankets, tablecloths and large sheets of colored paper.  Use props available to you to help create some visual interest: a large easy chair, a sofa (you can drape your background between two chairs and shoot between them–or tack the backdrop material to a wall or in a doorway).  Outdoors you could use a child’s swing set to drape you cloth over, or a low hanging tree limb.

Use Natural Light As Much As Possible

Where possible, use natural light from windows, porches, garage entries, doorways or other areas where there is a sufficient splash of light.  North facing areas are a great natural light source that isn’t overly harsh.  Natural light creates wonderful highlights and special effects on faces.   The changing season also cast light that can provide exceptional differences in shadows and in skin tones on your subjects.   Eliminating the use of your flash can also craft some interesting and useful affects.

Have Your Subject Pose For Pictures

Some of your photo subjects will be “hams” and pose naturally, while others may need to be coached into the position or pose you’d like to photograph.  Simple and casual poses work well in general.  You should be willing to try some other poses–even silly ones to draw-out your subject’s personality.  This is a time and place in your shoot where you can have some fun.

Don’t Be Afraid Of Close-ups

Close-up are the cream in your shoots.  They may show feature flaws, but that is who they are.  Try to fill the frame with as much of the focus you wish to capture: face, eyes, hands, etc.  Close-ups give you the opportunity to capture the strongest features of your subjects.  This is another time when taking snaps of various features would be helpful, and then select the ones that tell your story.

Take Plenty of Pictures

Whether you use a digital or film camera be sure to take plenty of shots while you have your subject, background and light.  Try shooting different angels, poses, light sources (time of day for natural light), distances, and color (black and white or color).  Don’t be in a hurry.  Mother Nature didn’t create her masterpieces in a day, so don’t you try.  As you take your pictures you’ll grow in confidence and ability. . . mistakes afford you the opportunity to learn and grow in your skill.

Scapbooking is not new by any stretch of the imagination.  The progression from simple “photo-books” to the more embellished scrapbook of recent years has been a major transformation.  Scrapbooking today has become as much an art form as a means of protecting and presenting our photographic handy-work.  Now, with the advent of the computer, much more can be accomplished by the paper crafter to ensure a picturesque presentation of those photographs.

Computer technology has brought forward the ability to marry pictures with graphic embellishments to make them more pleasing to view, and establish some meaningful organization–themed cataloging.  That is not to say that traditional scrapbooking has gone the way of the dinosaur.  What the computer provides is another medium to be able to generate enjoyable and pleasant photo-books or pages.

The cost to enjoy traditional scrapbooking has escalated over the years as new and exciting products and tools have been introduced.  There is also a significant time commitment when engaging in the traditional craft.  The computer has provided a lowering of the cost and time commitment, as well as providing easier and simpler ways to accomplish the same thing.

With the help of specialized computer programs like PhotoMix, a crafter can engage in scrapbooking using their computer to save both time and money.  With computer or digital scrapbooking you have no cutting or messing with tacky glues, and the clean-up is a snap.

Other worthwhile considerations for those inclined to do their scrapbooking with the help of their computer, the internet or online services should definitely consider Shutterfly.com.  They are equipped with a wide variety of opportunities to utilize and store your precious photos.

Scrapbooking should not be hindered by lack of opportunity, but only by lack of individual motivation.  You provide the motivation and photographs, and Shutterfly.com and Photomix will provide the other ingredients to help you complete a fantastic scrapbook.

Get going!

Scrapbookers have plenty to consider, but taking care of their photograph prints, negatives or digital files has to be one of the most important.

Photographs are the foundation of scrapbooking.  If you’re not taking care of your photo prints, negatives and digital files, you are setting yourself up for future problems.

How many pictures have you sorted through that have been handed down to your trust and care through the years.?  Do you have the negatives?  Do you know who is in the picture?  Where was the snapshot taken, and what does it represent?  These are issues each scrapbooker deals with.  Are you keeping adequate records and notations on the photographs you have taken?

You plan to pass these precious treasures onto your posterity.  Will they find themselves in the same dilemma you were in.  Where you can you should sort, identify and catalog each of your pictures.

You want to store these same cherished memories in such a way as to perpetuate their use and enjoyment for many generations to come.  There are methods and processes to handle these concerns.

We have provided several articles to help in discussing these important aspects of your effort–to share and preserve this photographic legacy for you and others through time.

Here are the articles you should consider to help you along the way:

• Care and Handling of Photographs
• Photo CD/DVD Storage Life
• Photograph Storage
• Digital Picture Storage
• Digitize Your Photo Prints for Long-term Storage
• Scanning Your Photo Prints to Digitize Them for Long-term Storage
• Care and Storage of Photograph Film Negatives

Good luck as you go about presenting and preserving your photographs, negatives and digital photo files.

Digitizing your printed photographs can provide a way for their long-term storage and care.

Album after album, and box after box of printed photos are neatly stashed in your craft-room or on a closet shelf.  You may have vintage photographs with no negatives.  Is this best place to warehouse these precious clips of time?  Perhaps not, but they are easily accessible.  Assuming you have taken every precaution to ensure your snapshots have been placed in a cool, relatively dry and protected environment, you may still have problems protecting them for the long haul.

Our suggestion is you have them scanned for digital storage.  You can scan them yourself if you have a scanner, but the quality of the image may not be as good as one done by a scanning service.

There are a number of services available, and a quick web search will give you several to choose from.  You may even have a reliable source right in your own area.  You could check with most any reputable photograph store for suggestions and recommendations.

Two online services you may want to consider, but we have not as yet used, are:

ScanDigital.com

ScanCafe.com

Each of these have their strong suits.  The advantage to both is you end up with hard print photos in a digital format.    These digital files could then be uploaded to a service such as Shutterfly.com to store, and allow unique uses of future prints–including sharing them with others (family and friends).

Like Film Photograph Prints and Negatives, Digital Pictures Have Special Requirements for Long Term Storage and Care.

With the advent of the digital camera the world of photography has taken a giant step.  Accept for the professional photographer and photographic purest, the digital camera has nearly replaced the need for film.  The discussion of the benefits and features for each format is better served elsewhere.  Here we will share some thoughts and ideas on the long term storage needs  for your digital images.

Keeping track of digital pictures is as important, and can be as time consuming as with regular negative and printed pictures.  Don’t forget that many digital snapshots will be printed, and they must be included with all other prints you may have.  So, categorizing and catalog your digital photo files is a requirement if you ever want to find that special shot you took.  You need to know where to find it easily.  This may not be a big problem at first, but as time goes on the number of pictures you take increases substantially.

CDs/DVDs and computer hard drive are choices many photographers use to store and organize their digital images.  You can organize them chronologically, by subject or theme, etc., what ever is best for you.  They can be reorganized as you desire at anytime.

The memory card in your camera (some high end cameras have their own hard drive) will store a limited number of pictures, but they can serve as a storage medium.  You need to catalog what is on the card and file it in a storage contained with your file’s content for future reference.  This medium is considered a “temporary solution” to storage.  These memory cards can run the cost of storage up, so most photo bugs use other ways of storing their treasured photographs.  Most pictures are transferred to your computer’s hard drive.

Your computer’s hard drive has much larger storage capacity than the memory card found in your camera.  From the hard drive you can better organize your picture files as you deem appropriate and needed.

There are risks of using your hard drive for long term storage.  The biggest concern would be have your computer “crash.”  Hopefully, you back-up your hard drive files frequently!

As noted above, CDs and DVDs have come to the rescue as an additional storage option–certainly as a back-up for your picture files.  These options may require the purchase of special “burners” in order to use them.  Many new computers come with one or the other, but they can be added.  The primary difference between the two is the amount of storage capacity.  DVDs have a greater capacity than CDs.

Making prints of all your snapshots is an option.  They could be scanned should you loose your digital file.  These prints require special attention too for long term storage.

Beware, however, these methods for photograph storage do have limitation and limited life spans. All of these options for photograph storage have limitations.  CDs/DVDs generally have a shelf life of 2-10 years.  There are some new expensive discs available that are touted to have a 100+ year life . . . not yet tested in reality for 100 years.  Hard drives are prone to their own set of problems.

Our  long term storage choice is online storage companies like Shutterfly.com.  They allow you to organize them, print them, share them with others, and print them on other mediums to give as gifts.  We highly recommend you look at what they offer in the way of service and products.  Yes there is a fee for some of their services, but you’re paying for what you get or use either way.  The safety, usability and ease are definitely worth the expense.

Putting your photo prints into a digital storage format will help you keep your pictures for a long time.

Do you have boxes and drawers full of printed snapshots.? How about those precious and delicate photos that have been handed down to you over the years from others?  What about those pictures where you have no negative to print additional copies from?  These are questions that confront all of us as the years accumulate–along with the number of pictures we have.

Digital cameras have helped us to some extent keep selected photograhic material in a digital format.  There is still the long term storage of these data files created by our new cameras. 

If you treasure your vast collection of photographs taken over the years, or those given to you, you may want to consider having these prints scanned into a digital format for long term storage. 

The typical home scanner generally doesn’t have the resolution quality you need to scan delicate photos.  We recommend you consider the use of professional scanning services.  You can check with your local photography shops for suggestions of local services to help you.  There are a couple of online services you could use.  While we have used them ourselves, they come with good reputations.  Consider: ScanDigital.com and ScanCafe.com.

Ultimately, we recommend the use of long term digital storage companies like Shutterfly.com to be the respository for our precious snapshots of history.  You should definitely check out their services.

There are still a great number of photo negatives sitting around with your older printed snapshots.  How do you store and care for them?

There’s a good chance you have as many photo negatives floating around in drawers and boxes as you do printed pictures.  Once we have a print why do we need the negative?  The obvious answer is so we can make copies  or enlargements if we decide or have a need to at some later date.

Just like the storage suggestions for our prints (sort, arrange, catalog, etc.) we can do the same for our photo’s negatives.  They can be stored with the prints themselves, or separately.  There is some rationale of separating them–damage to one storage area may not mean all your photographic efforts are lost.  You could keep pictures in one area and the negatives in another (separate closest for instance).

When sorting and cataloging your negatives, you should make them the same as for your prints.  That way you have an easy reference to fall back on should the need arise.  Also, finding them will be a whole lot easier–for both.

Of recent years, negatives are returned in their own sleeves provided by the developer.  They can be stored in these sleeves, but consider this a short term or temporary solution.

Longer term storage will require you to place them in storage holders with archival features–like archival paper separators, individual sleeves.  Binders and storage boxes that are lignin and acid free are a must.

Like photographs, print negatives are sensitive to light, heat and humidity.  The same care and attention should be given to your negatives as you would your printed photographs.

Plastic pocket pages should be made of a polyethylene or polypropylene.  (Do not use holders that contain PVC–a sure trouble maker for your negatives.) Older plastic or paper holders provided by developers may not be safe, and you should change them.

Deterioriating acetate film negatives give off a vineager type odor.  They may also begin to wrinkle or warp.  Once this process has begun (a chemical degradation) it becomes irreversible.  Slowing the decaying process can be aided with cold temperature storage.  Cold storage needs to be as frost-free as possible.  When removing film negatives for use be sure to bring them slowly back up to room temperature before handling them.  Carefully spreading out the negatives as they come up to room temperature will help reduce vapor collecting on them.  This process should take place naturally–don’t try to hurry the procedure by adding heat to the negatives!

The Usable Storage Life of CDs and DVDs Is Not As Long As You Might Hope or Want.

With the digital age coming into its own, many of us have turned to storing much of our information, including our photographs, on CDs and DVDs.  The difference between the two, for the purpose of storage, is in the amount of data that can be stored.  The DVD format wins.  But that is not the problem we’re really confronted with.  How long will they last in storing  precious information–including our photographs?

In a January 10, 2006 article in Computerland, Kurt Gerecke, a physicist and storage expert at IBM was quoted as saying: “If you want to avoid having to burn new CDs every few years, use magnetic tapes to store all your pictures, videos and songs for a lifetime.”

There is a wide range of life expectancy for these storage mediums:  from a couple of years, as noted above, to 100 years by the manufacturers.  The later figure surely hasn’t been proven yet.  We suspect the span lies somewhere in the middle, and most likely on the lower side of middle.

The construction of CDs and DVDs used to store photographs on is subject to the same type of deterioration that film negatives and printed pictures are.  They require the same type of storage care.  Light, heat and humidity are agents that can shorten or destroy the information burned on these discs.  Cooler temperatures seem to be the prime issue.

The quality levels of the disc’s construction has some bearing.  Higher quality discs tend to have a longer life.  The unfortunate thing is determining the quality of the disc is difficult.  Visually, you can’t tell much from a low budget discs versus a high end disc.  We would just accept they all have a much lower life span than we’d prefer.

There is research being done to extend the life of these storage mediums.  Currently, they are still being tested, and carry a very stiff price to purchase if you can find them.

Using a storage company may be the better alternative like Shutterfly.com. Their services will relieve you of the stress or concern about long term storage.  We recommend you check them out.

More Information on the Long-term Care and Storage of Photograph Prints

Many of us have drawer fulls of precious snapshots we’ve taken over the years.  This is not the best solution for long term storage of these valuable jewels of our personal history.

Photographs are in fact delicate in their make-up, and subject to damage from both our handling them improperly and deterioration from the effects of light, heat and humidity.

Minimizing each of these marauders of our heirloom pictures will help make them last for generations.  Placing photos in protective holders is the first step in protecting and preserving precious snapshots.  This can also help keep them from the damage casused by frequent handling.

Albums are an inexpensive repository for storing photograph.  They can be sorted and grouped as needed, by page or book.  They can be bulky, but very serviceable.  Photo albums should be used for your best pictures.  Weed out the poor images (blurred or unfocused).  Eliminate duplicates–extra pictures can be stored in other containers with other similar snapshots.

Other photographic storage options are: folders, sleeves, envelopes and boxes.  Which of these holders you wish to use is predicated on personal preference and the frequency with which pictures would be handled.  Also, you have to consider the delicate nature of older photos . . . these require special handling and care.  A separate folder or envelope is best suited for fragile older pictures.  These individual holders/envelopes help support and protect delicate photos.  Excessive handling of damaged or worn older photos only increases their deterioration.  Adding a rigid acid free piece of paperboard will help support and protect these special pictures.

Plastic sleeves work especially well for photographs that are handled frequently.  The sleeve should be made of a non-PVC material.  Photo shops carry sleeves that are made for pictures.  Pictures stored in folders should be well labeled to reduce the handling of the pictures.  Oils from hands can be a harbor for mold.  Copies can be made of older sensitive pictures or duplicates made.

Storage boxes made of acid free paper, or metal boxes can be used to store photos.  The box used should be representative of the size of the photos being stored.  There should be little room for movement of the photos.  Pictures should be stood on end, and filler, where needed, added to void areas.  The container should be well documented with the contents of the box–a list of pictures is a good way–set inside the contain.  On the outside a general identification should be made . . . alphabetical, chronological, by subject matter, etc. –what ever is best suited to your needs.  The last thing you need or want to do is rifle through several boxes to find just the right snapshot.

Keep your photographs organized and stored in containers that provide you with the best protection and accessibility.