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!