I’m taking another class. This one is called “Love Your Pictures, Love Your Pages.” It’s from Shimelle and you can find the class here. The class is a hybrid of photography and scrapbooking. It focuses on taking better pictures that you’ll love … which means you’ll love your scrapbooking pages more as a result.

Before the class started, we were given a challenge to take a spontaneous photo. We were told to take a photo in the next five minutes. And at that moment, Shelby walked into my room and had a meltdown. So, I took a picture of her meltdown! I’m sure she hated me at the moment, but I am so glad I have this photo. I take all sorts of happy photos, but we aren’t always happy, right?

The class prompt for the second day had us taking pictures of flowers. Here’s my favorite from that prompt. Finding flowers in Arizona can be tough. If I would have had more time and was feeling better (I have an ear infection right now), I would have found a flowering cactus to shoot, which is my absolute favorite desert image.

These photos, like most of them, were taken on my point and shoot or my iPhone (I take a lot of iPhone pictures). I’m getting a fancy camera this month!!! Woo hoo! I can’t wait. I hope when I get the new camera my pictures will be even better.

By Grace Tolman

As a scrapbooker, photography seemed to go hand in hand with our “craft”. They are after all one of the most important parts of our layouts. I don’t know about all of you, but choosing my photos is always my first step when I make pages.

Now I’m not a professional photographer (although I wish I was!) but with a few years of snapping with my camera and learning tips and tricks from the experts, I could say that I have a skill in it. So with that being said, I wanted to share a few things I’ve learned along the way about photography.

My hope is that this little share will inspire and empower you to better capture those special moments in your lives.

I want to focus my article on Perspective photography.

You don’t have to have the most expensive camera or be very good at PhotoShop to capture that one shot that will be “worth a thousand words”. In my experience, just shooting from different angles makes the biggest difference and can make even a simple photograph turn into a work of art.

Shooting from the top

This photograph was taken last year at my daughter’s preschool. They were celebrating St. Patrick’s day with a fun leprechaun activity. She gathered her “gold” and wanted to put her new found treasures in a safe place. I told her to put it in my pocket and while she was doing that, I focused my camera straight down and got this shot. This method still showed the theme of the event (gold from the leprechaun and all the green around the photo) as well as captures the special trust she has for me by letting me keep her “treasures”. I was also able to capture her small and sweet hand. Something I know will change in time.

Follow your model with your camera

With any sport or moving photo, you need to keep your camera on the subject at all times. In this photo, my son and I were playing in our trampoline. He was doing all sorts of jumping tricks and for me to be able to capture them, I decided to keep the camera on him. I was literally moving up and down with him and when I felt that the time was right, I clicked!

Shooting from the bottom

If you are trying to take photos of tall buildings, it’s best to shoot from the bottom. When my family and I went to Las Vegas early this month, I wanted to take a shot of the tall hotel building as well as the beautiful ship on display. Being that they’re both very large and tall, I knelt down and took the shot looking up. With this method, I was able to get all the building and ship in my photo without missing any detail. Plus the angle instantly tells you the size of the subject.

It’s all in the details

Sometimes zooming is the best thing to capture some very small details. With this flower picture, I wanted to show the intricate beauty of the flowers. You can see the ruffled petals, the two toned color of the flowers and some of the greens in the stem.

Give the camera to somebody else or use the self timer

And finally something that’s very important…. You need to be in the photos too!!!

This is something that I neglected for a few years but then I realized that I need my future family to know how I looked as well. They need to get a vision of who I am and that’s never going to happen if I keep taking the photos and is never in it.

With this shot, I actually used my self timer and propped the camera on top of a nearby wood table while my family was at the park. This takes a few minor preparations, making sure everyone is in the right spots and that you can easily run back to the group after you’ve programmed the camera to take the photo. It usually gives you about 10 good seconds before it snaps.

So there you have it. Hope these few tips will improve your skills in photography and will make your scrapbook pages even better.

Signing off,

Grace

Lar's pizza lunch some where in Utah (photos by Lars Kj'r Larsen)

I take a lot of pictures. I travel a lot too. Sometimes it’s hard to come up with creative ways to photograph my trips and kiddos with all the picture taking I do.

A little snack in Wyoming

One of my colleagues, Lars, is on a cross country road trip right now. He always takes the best photos, so I’m almost giddy with excitement each time an email full of photos from him arrives in my in-box. Lars is quite the traveler, so it’s interesting and amazing to me that his photos never seem boring or trite. The latest batch he sent were titled “Eating our way across America.”

He decided to take photos of all the places he and his brother ate as the headed from Georgia, up to Canada and then out West. It might sound a little odd, but it was a fresh perspective and perfectly told the story of their road trip. There are pictures of breakfast at the hotel. Dinner at roadside dives. Quick breakfasts of coffee and donuts.

Pie in Michigan

When in doubt, change your perspective. You don’t have to take the same pictures, the same way, every time. Switch things up a bit. Be creative. Think long and hard about how you can best tell your story in fresh and fun new way.

A photo Kim took of a layout she created using the June 2009 Main Kit.

I enjoy perusing online galleries and blogs for inspiration in my scrapbooking. What makes it more enjoyable is when the photos are nice and clear with detail. I’m by no means an expert in the photography field, but I have tried to glean something from those who are.

The first priority for me in photographing pages is the lighting. I like natural light and usually take my photo in the early morning or late evening for the best light, or I have a shady spot off my back porch that seems to work pretty well. You may have a good place to do that indoors — but I do not, so play around and see what works best in your circumstance. I do not recommend direct sun, especially the midday sun, it is much too harsh of a light to get a nice quality picture.

An easel can be a great tool for photographing your layouts.

I have purchased an inexpensive metal easel (at left) to use for the purpose of photographing my layouts.  You may also prefer to lay them down on a flat surface and photograph from above.

I have a Canon Rebel XTI and my favorite lens is my 50mm f/1.8. Don’t worry if you don’t have a DSLR camera, you can work with what you have. Again, to me the lighting is what makes the photo look good.

Without getting too technical, my advice is to fill as much of your viewfinder with your layout as possible and take a straight on shot of the page. I will usually take 2-3 shots like this then look through them and find the best looking one. That is what is great about digital — just keep shooting until you get a good one!

A "detailed" photo

I then like to pick out 3 or 4 details of page to take some close-ups. If you use a lot of dimension in your layouts, try to capture that in your photo. 

A close-up of journaling.

The way I do this is taking the photo from somewhat of a side angle to the page I also like to get a close up of the journaling. Of course, sometimes just one picture is all that is needed for a page.

From here, I load my pictures and find 3 or 4 that I like best and open them in Photoshop. Again, if you don’t have Photoshop, don’t fret. Use what you have! There are several freebies you can download like Google’s Picasa — it if very user friendly and finally available for Macs! I even use Microsoft’s Picture Manager for simple editing and resizing.

What I do is crop down my full layout to the edges. I don’t like to have any background in my pictures to distract from my masterpiece!

From this:

The layout before the photo has been cropped.

To this:

After being cropped

Sometimes I need a little adjustment and have to rotate my photo somewhat to get it straight. I might also tweak the brightness if I didn’t have my camera settings just right. One thing you’ll definitely need to check is the size of your photo. A lot of online galleries or blogs want you to submit in a certain file size, so adjust accordingly. I have an action set up on my photoshop to do this automatically, but I’m a little lazy and I like consistency. Mine is set up to resize to around 1200 pixels at 100 resolution. Also, anything I’m going to upload to the web gets “saved for web…” at about a 75 quality. This will also cut down on upload time.

I would love to know if anyone has other suggestions for photographing or editing photos of their pages or projects. Mine is a work in progress and I’m always making adjustments to my process.