CrazyDaisy

Here’s a wonderful and informative guest post from our design team leader, Kim Whitten: Tips for photographing your layouts.

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.

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