ScrappingTips

Summertime Blues

I have a really hard time getting inspired to do much of anything during July and August, even things I enjoy doing like scrapbooking. If the temp is pushing 90+ sometimes the very best option is a big pitcher of lemonade with a few stems of crushed mint, a stack of videos, and the AC cranked up as high as possible. But there are only so many weekends that you can idle away like that without feeling like a total slug. Plus if you're not out there making memories you don't have anything to scrapbook.

When I'm badly in need of inspiration, some reason to leave the house and venture out onto those steamy streets, I read the Surreal Muse's list of suggested artist dates. The Muse's list always reminds me of something interesting that I've been meaning to do.

Another to-do list that never fails to get me moving is Keri Smith's "How To Be A Guerilla Artist." As Keri describes it "Guerilla art is a fun and insidious way of sharing your vision with the world. It is a method of art making which entails leaving anonymous art pieces in public places. It can be done for a variety of reasons, to make a statement, to share your ideas, to send out good karma, or just for fun. My current fascination with it stems from a belief in the importance of making art without attachment to the outcome. To do something that has nothing to do with making money, or listening to the ego."

Punk Scrapbooking

My friend Wes, who is making a movie on scrapbooking, has an interesting rant on his blog about embracing your inner nerd.

Wes, as you can see by this photo, isn't your average scrapper and when he shows up at crop events and conventions he tends to stick out in the crowd. But he's noticed that "middle American family types who, despite my alarming difference in attitude and appearance, have welcomed me with open arms and are bending over backwards to embrace a different culture and broaden their perspective..." while the counter-culture types turn up their pierced noses and say "that's uncool."

Wes knows he's making a big, broad generalization here, but bottom line he has a point when he says:

"I'm switching over to the other side and saying dammit, I'm a scrapbooker because it's not cool! It's nerdy but it's full of creative, funny and completely transparent people who are expressing themselves and their stories on their own terms with their own voices. That's pretty damn punk to me."

Punk indeed – because punk was all about do-it-yourself. Want to make music but can't play a note? No problem, pick up an instrument and crank up the amps. No magazines out there covering the stuff you want to read? Publish your own. No one making the kind of clothes you want to wear? Customize your vintage finds.

Wes' thoughts also reminded me of a great "Manifesto for Growth" I have bookmarked but haven't read lately -- #14 of the manifesto reads " Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort."

There's plenty of other scrapbooking (and life) inspiration in the manifesto too:

3. "Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there."

4. "Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day."

5. "Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value."

Cards for Soldiers

I went completely digital with my scrapbooking five or six years ago and never looked back. But I'd acquired huge heaps of paper and embellishments which I could never bring myself to get rid of – knowing that as soon as they left my house I'd be struck by a sudden need to decoupage my entire kitchen or wallpaper the bathroom with scrapping supplies.

Happily, no matter how we scrap, we can all put the excess supplies to good use now. 123-Scrap has come up with a great project -- provide deployed soldiers with handmade cards to send back home to their friends and family. Participants make cards according to a designated monthly theme, and then send them on over to 123-Scrap who forwards them to troops stationed in Iraq – the soldiers can then send the cards back home to their family and friends. General occasion cards such as birthday, get well, anniversary, thinking of you, and etc. are also needed.

Cards need to be standard A2 size (5 1/2" x 4 1/4") with blank insides so that the soldiers may write their own personal messages. 123-Scrap says that many of the cards will be sent to children, so keep that in mind when you're working out your designs.

Scrapbooking on the Road

I write for Fodor's Travel Wire, my husband is a photographer who is always looking for new scenes to snap, and whether its for business or pleasure there's nothing we like better than traveling – especially road trips. Traveling and the desire to do something interesting with our travel photos is what got me interested in scrapbooking a decade or so ago, though back then I didn't refer to it as scrapbooking. I used to say I did "really elaborate photo albums."

I always have stacks of photos from our trips sitting on my hard drive, waiting for me to have the time to scrapbook them. I'm a couple of years behind now, and even though I took good notes because most of my trips turn into articles or guidebooks I'm still finding its hard to do justice to the memories after the trip is long over.

So when I read Ali Edwards' recent article on making a scrapbook on the road I thought it was a great idea – an idea so obvious I should have figured it out on my own years ago. One problem though, Ali suggests gluing down memorablia you pick up during the day (menus, matchbooks, business cards, maps, newspaper clippings, napkins, postcards, etc) and jotting down notes while leaving spaces to add your photos once you get home. I tried that but it totally doesn't work for me (doesn't mean it's not a fine suggestion, it just doesn't work for me). I design my pages around my photos since I'm lucky enough to have such terrific photos to work with – so adding the images later to a pre-made page wasn't the way for me to go.

Don't know why it took me so long to figure this out either, but the obvious solution is so simple. Now I just upload the digital files to a photo developer straight from my laptop computer each night when we're traveling (luckily most hotels, even the budget ones, have high speed internet service.) If I'm going to be in the same town for a couple of days, I enter the local zip code off the hotel stationery for my pick-up location and can pretty much always have my photos in my hands within an hour of hitting the send button. If I'm heading out early the next day, I enter the name of a town that I'll be passing through around lunchtime, and pick up my photos there.

I work on layouts at night for an hour or so. By the time I get home my travel scrapbook is usually done, and I can actually show people my layouts while they're still interested – no more telling them they'll need to wait months or years to see my trip photos. I'm also way more comfortable knowing we have a printed copy of my husband's pictures lest something happen to our equipment and we lose the digital files – we back up like crazy but I figure you can never have too many copies.

And there's something really wonderful about having real, physical prints of our photos to show to people I meet on the road who are interested in seeing where we've been. Having to drag out my laptop from its case, boot up the system, open Photoshop and show them pictures on the screen just takes too much time and kills the mood.

I'm thinking about doing a long road trip next fall, down the Blues Highway. The place where American music really began -- Highway 61 which runs from Chicago deep into the Delta and on to New Orleans. There's so much history to preserve in photos and words on that road – does anyone have any suggestions of where to go, what to see, good blues clubs, etc? And would you all be interested in reading a blog on a photography-taking, scrapbook-making road trip down the Blues Highway?

 

 

Perfect Prints

Boston and Cincinnati news stations have stories up on their websites with some interesting information on a digital photo printing study that was recently conducted by Consumer Reports.

According to WCPO in Cincinnati "Home photo printing --which was supposed to be cheap and easy -- is not cheap, and for most of us, not easy."

The answer to that quandary is obvious – get your photos printed professionally. But WCPO points out that when Consumer Reports compared more than two-thousand photos from leading stores and online photofinishing sites they found that not all photo developers delivered great results.

 "Most stores use either a Kodak or a Fujifilm minilab. In our test the Fujifilm minilabs provided the best quality prints," Consumer Reports reported, as quoted by WCPO reporter John Matarese.

CBS4 Boston noted that "Printing your digital snapshots at home can actually cost more than getting them printed online or in a store."

"Wal-Mart has Fujifilm minilabs and Consumer Reports says at 19 cents for a four-by-six print, digital photo processing at Wal-Mart is just about the best deal around," CBS4 reported. Costco or Sam's club also got kudos for their photo finishing services.

 I have to admit that I'm pretty blasé about many of the truly magical things I can do with my computer and an Internet connection. But I'm still amazed that I can upload my digital photos right from my computer and then pick them up at a local store within an hour of uploading them. Like science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke said "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

The study is printed in full in Consumer Reports' "Annual Photo Guide," which is in the July issue of the magazine.

 

Wes World

 

Video clip of my buddy Wes, AKA Mr. Scrapped-The-Movie, doing an interview at the FujiFilm booth during the Arlington Great American Scrapbook Convention.

Video Clip from The Great American Scrapbook Convention

 

 

Missouri meets Texas

Cropping At The Convention

 

East Coast croppers don't fret if you missed the Arlington Great American Scrapbook Convention, there's another one coming up next week in Chantilly, right outside of D.C.

Making Memories at the Great American Scrapbook Convention

 

Live from the floor of the biggest scrapbooking convention

Fab Filters for Photoshop

When I first started seriously using Photoshop I went filter crazy – plug-ins were my friend. And I wasn't the only one – back when Photoshop came on a few floppy disks (yes, really) it seemed like everyone was enraptured with the program's built in art filters.

But like a pop song that's in heavy rotation on the radio, filters soon got played out. Soon enough the easiest way to make a graphic designer sneer was to use a filter or two in your Photoshop work. That was right around the time when we all suddenly realized that no, the watercolor filter doesn't really make your photo look like a painting. (You can produce effects that mimic watercolors and other real world mediums, but not with a single pass of Photoshop's watercolor filter.)

Happily most people have eased off the rabid plug-in prejudice now, and most figure that filters are fine as long as they aren't used as an end in themselves – that is, special effect aren't ever a good substitute for your creativity. Think of the difference between a well-plotted and acted movie and one that relies solely on splashy special effects to grab your attention – which film are you likely to want to look at more than once?

My favorite filter now, one that I use on a daily basis and the workhorse and creative muse in my plug-in folder, is Alien Skin's Exposure filter. The advertising blurb promises that this set of filters brings "the look and feel of film to digital photography... allowing you to digitally simulate the dozens of film stocks, both color and black and white, and with the size, shape, and color of real world film grain." It does, it works like a charm, and it also has a slew of one-click effects that lets you simulate the look of old photos – from daguerreotypes to the first color films – as well as darkroom developing techniques like cross-processing and pushing. And it includes some terrific digital editing features, letting you correct color, soften a portrait, and boost contrast among other features. All of the effects can be applied with one click, or you can tweak the settings to suit your needs.

Exposure is $199 for the package, which includes dozens of effects for color and black and white prints (Exposure also does great color to black and white conversions). You get a discount on the price if you're a registered user of any other Alien Skin product.

Download a free 30 day demo and check it out – it works on Mac and Windows boxes (Windows users must have at least a 2 GHz Pentium 4 processor, 256 MB RAM and Windows 2000 or Windows XP. Macintosh users must have at least a 1 GHz PowerPC G4 processor, 256 MB RAM and Mac OS X 10.3.8 or later) and you'll need a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS or later, Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 or later, Macromedia Fireworks MX 2004 or later, Corel® Paint Shop ProTM 9 or later to use the plug-in.

I also love OptikVerve lab's Virtual Photographer, which is free for the downloading and includes 50 one-click effects that you can use to apply interesting combinations of film grain, color modification, B/W, soft focus, high contrast and other effects. Every time I use it, and I use it a lot, I'm amazed that OptikVerve is giving Virtual Photographer away for free.