Four Generations

I did the above photo tonight. My grandma passed away last week. I was tasked with going through albums and gathering photos of her for the funeral home. They made them into a photo collage DVD that was played during the calling hours. So while selecting and scanning, I came across this photo that I'd never seen before. My grandpa apparently took it.

This picture struck me for 2 reasons: First, I knew my great-grandma had died when I was about a year old, but I'd never seen a picture of her and I together before. (I am the baby, in case you couldn't tell.) Second, great-grandma was suffering from Alzheimers at the time. My grandma had Dimentia when she passed, with is a skip frmo Alzheimers. And honestly...a couple weeks ago, when someone at her nursing home asked her how old she was and she said "23"....she might have already crossed that line into Alzheimers. (she was in her late 80s.)

I thought printing out this picture and scrapbooking it would be a fitting tribute. And since the photo is circa 1970s, I was going with all 70s kitch mod colors. Or trying to, at least. I remember that teal being on alot of vinyl chairs when I was a kid.

So. Supplies. Yeah. Ok, the cardstock is DCWV. The alphas are from Sotheby's. The metal embelly is from Making Memories, as is the epoxy button by the title. The flowered paper was a new paper pack from a company I've not used before, and thus can't remember the name. (Seriously, I should take notes.) The remaining scrap strips and the ribbon were scrap donations from an online scrap swap I participated in. Consequently, I have no idea who made those.

A Scrapbook, of Sorts

I spent today working on a scrapbook, of sorts. It didn't involve any paper, adhesive, or scissors. But it involved alot of photos. 48 to be exact.

My brother turned 30 last week. Because my sister and her husband were scheduled to drive in from New Jersey for a cousin's wedding this weekend, we opted to celebrate my brother's birthday today instead of on the actual day. As it was, he had his evening college classes on his birthday anyways. So he really was fine with the suggestion.

The scrapbook came into the picture yesterday. My mother asked me if I could put together a digital slide show of photos of my brother from the last 30 years. I had just figured out how to set this up with my Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 in the last week. (After a year, I finally took the time to learn the software.) So I said, sure, no problem. I'd create the slideshow in no-time.

My mother provided me with a collection of pictures that she had located. I had a photo album of my grandparents' that had alot of early pictures. I also had the photo CDs for both my sister's wedding as well as my own. I also had the addresses of his Facebook and Myspace pages.

So having gathered my sources, I set to work around lunchtime today. I scanned and edited photo after photo. I would like here to point out, that some cameras just really did a crappy job with pictures. The Minolta Disk camera I had in the late 80s, took really fuzzy pictures. They scan poorly. But what can you do?

Ultimately, I scanned around 30 photos and had another 18 that where on the wedding CDs, or had already been scanned into my computer at some time in the recent past. I then ordered them all in my Adobe Photoshop slideshow project. I downloaded songs from iTunes (picked from his Favorites list on his Myspace page) and I convered them to wave files. Then I not only added them to the slideshow, but I set the photos to start off the "intro" slide on music cues. (That talent was honed on 9 years of violin training.) All in all, it was pretty nifty amd only took me maybe 2 hours most to set up.

Then came the hard part. I had to save it to a CD or DVD in a format that could be read by a TV or another computer. My first attempts at this with other slideshows in the last week, ended up with low resolution slideshows. Apparently Adobe's default format is pretty crappy on the resolution. It took me another 2 hours of trying formats and then letting my PC have 30min to spool to a file, before I got something that worked.

Ultimately, my brother thought it was funny. My mother loved it. My sister thought it was cool. And I? I myself, am jazzed to use this new skill to setup family heritage photo slideshows for viewing each Christmas. I can't wait to get started!

Finding Photo Subjects

I subscribe to several scrapbooking magazines. (Gives me something to read on lunch.) I've also invested in a number of scrapbooking books on various topics. As I flip through page after page of scrapbooking layouts, I'm struck by one thing. These people have perfect photos. Not only seemingly perfect photos, but photos of all these events, from the mundane to the monumental.

I'll tell you right now, that's not what I have in my collection of photos. When I go places, I try to remember to take my camera. Sometimes, I'll get to where we're going and take a whole bunch of pictures. But more often than not, I won't pull my camera out at all. Or, worse yet, I will forget to bring my camera in the first place.

Honestly, ultimately what I end up with is a ton of pictures of my cats, many of which have bad lighting, are out of focus, or both. I rarely end up with pictures of people. I'm not even sure why that is. Perhaps it's an unconscious extension of my natural aversion to having my own picture taken. (My wedding day was torture, in that respect. Cameras EVERYWHERE, all pointed at ME!) Perhaps I just don't want to subject other people to what I perceive as torture.

Or maybe I'm just lazy and forgetful. I would lean towards laziness when it comes to having the camera present but not taking any pictures. I once came back from a trip to Disney World with 5 pictures. Admittedly, I was with my parents and my dad snappeda thousand pictures, I swear. But still. 5 pictures? From Disney World? Who cares if I had been there 5 times before? Laziness.

So my struggle with photos then, is not that I can't organize them. (I have an effective system that works for me.) Rather it's that I don't have pictures that are good enough, or of a wide enough variety to effectively scrapbook at times. (Hmmm...47 layouts of cats in various sleeping poses, anyone?)

Well I will tell you this. It is still early Spring in. I have a new purse, with a new wallet, that means I now have room to carry around my camera, if I so choose. I have a wedding coming up this week. I sent in the applications for our 2009 zoo memberships. I have a trip in a few weeks to visit my sister in NJ. And I'm mentally planning several camping trips and trips to visit other area zoos. I will vow now...to take my camera...and take pictures. I will take pictures of people I love and places I visit. I will get up the courage to ask other people to take my picture with these people and at these places. And I will utimately end up with a vast collection of subjects for my Scrapbooking enjoyment!

Helping a Fellow Scrapbooker

I haven't done a whole lot of scrapbooking in the last week or so. I finally started on the Birthday minibook, which will list all the birthdays for Hubby's family. But I've only done the cover. That's because I spent some of my scrapbook time mesing around on the computer. (Read: Procrastination) And why is that? Because I am anal and have to start my projects at the beginning. That means the cover. The cover...was chipboard. And to glue paper onto chipboard, I had to use Zipdry, an adhesive I've never used before. I hate weird glues. It worked, the cover is great, but I'd rather post a little more than the cover. So we'll see how far I get this week.

Anyways. So since I wasn't scrapbooking for myself, I thought I'd help enable a friend to scrapbook. My friend B, who is one of the people who got me into scrapbooking, is having a baby. She had a baby shower a few weeks ago, and I got to go. It was alot of fun, but...I didn't know anyone there except her. And there were ALOT of people there. Not one of my favorite positions to be in.

What did I do? Well, I occupied myself with taking pictures. I took pictures of EVERYTHING. Decorations, gifts, games, food. When it came time for the opening of the massive amount of gifts, I positioned myself opposite B, and I snapped away. They're not the best photos. But then, sometimes the photos that best tell the story aren't the best photos on their own.

When all was said and done, I had 100 photos. 100! I couldn't believe I took that many photos. And then I was faced with downloading them from my camera and burning them to a CD. I'm a programmer, so I'm not technically challenged. BUT, I've never actually sat down and taken the time to learn how to use my copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements. I was able to do some of that. I didn't make a fancy slide show for her, since the objective was to get her photos on a CD for future scrapbooking purposes. But I did see some of the possibilities. Now my mind is swirling with my own future photo projects.

It's fun to work on our own scrapbook projects. But sometimes it's even more fun to enable a friend to work on their own scrapbooking projects. And the more friends I find who scrapbook...the better!

All About the Hat

This layout was one that I actually had half-planned in my head before our honeymoon was over. I had the title and photos in mind, because I thought they were cute and kitchy.

What happened...is I burned my scalp at Disney World. Come on, I'm a pastey blond programmer. I don't get sun. I was wearing my hair in a pony tail day after day, and my scalp burnt at the demarcation between my bangs and my pulled-back hair. Owie. And this was the end of DAY 2. So as we were leaving the Magic Kingdom that evening, we stopped in at the hat store on Main Street, and hubby bought me my first baseball cap. I don't wear hats, so he had to adjust it for me. He got himself a new had too. I snapped a picture of us while waiting for the bus back to the resort.

The saying on my hat, says "Mood subject to change without notice." And it shows a picture of a grumpy Tinkerbell. The saying...is me to a T.

Design-wise, I picked up the layout from the Scrapbooks ETC. magazine Pagemaps edition. I used alot of bright apple-greens to play to the green of Tinkerbell's dress, as well as the green of half the text on the hat. I loved that I was able to find a Tinkerbell embellishment that pretty well matched the grumpy Tinkerbell on the hat itself.

Supplies: Oi...cardstock is DCWV, but I don't know what any of the other items are. This was done along time ago, so I don't have the rest of the supply packaging to even look at.

And just so you know....Hubby is still teasing me about wearing the hat. Not that I burnt my scalp. No, he thinks it's funny that the hat was so low on my brow...because of my pony tail. The rest of the trip, the hat keeps sitting farther and farther back on my head, as I put my pony tail a little lower each day. Like I said before...I don't wear hats!