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November 7, 2009 |
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Created and Maintained by: The Photoimaging Information Council |
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by Kim Brady |
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You'll never get a second chance to photograph your children growing up. Every day, every moment is unique. Keeping your camera close will help you record all those important memories and save them in albums as special as your new baby.
Very Special Photos Many experts suggest that you have a professional portrait made of your baby every three months for the first year or two, because they change so rapidly. If Mom isn't camera-shy, ask for a mother and child series, including breastfeeding. "Madonna" portraits can be done very tastefully and they make beautiful portraits. After age 2, you should have at least one new portrait made every year until high school graduation (school mug shots don't count!). Most hospitals work with an infant photographer who can take the first portrait — just to get you started. If you want to find a qualified portrait photographer in your community, visit these websites: www.wppi-online.com or www.ppa.com. Every Day Photos • Shoot early and often. Make your children comfortable with having their pictures taken. They'll be less likely to freeze or act up when you point the camera in their direction.
• Avoid background clutter. The more clutter in the background, the more it detracts from your subject, so watch out for poles, cords, or bookshelves piled with toys. If the background adds to the story, try to keep it slightly out of focus.  © Kim Brady
• Print your pictures! Photos are meant to be shared and it's difficult to carry your laptop 24/7. I order conventional prints from a photo kiosk at my local retailer. That way, I know I'm going to get exactly what I see on the kiosk monitor and I feel confident that the prints will last well into the next generation. Ink-jet prints are also very stable if made with the proper printer/ink combination. Photograph your new baby in every possible activity: Awake, sleeping, smiling, crying, bathing, playing, and eating. In the early months, these activities will be somewhat limited but they will change with each passing week and you don't want to miss a single stage. Scrapbooking companies offer plenty of suggestions with their "baby phrases" products, like EK Success's Phrase Cafe series below. Don't take just one photo of each event or activity — think "photo series" — and keep shooting until you run out of steam or card space (whichever comes first). And don't take all of them from the same angle. The benefit of a photo series is in capturing the subject (and activity) from many different angles, so you have plenty of pictures to remind you of that special birthday party, day in the park, or baby's first steps.  © Kim Brady
This page was made from the Kodak Baby Memory Kit (www.adorama.com/KK9164.html?sid=121824566171705), which comes complete with a post-bound scrapbook, paper, stickers and cardboard cutouts (right, above) and other scrapbooking supplies. I added the “Our Little Man” sticker and ribbon from my own collection. Another photo technique that's popular in scrapbooking is called "baby parts." Originally adopted by professional baby photographers, it involves taking close-up pictures of each of your baby's parts — eyes, ears, nose, fingers, and toes — and using them in a photo series on one or more scrapbook pages. If it's too late for you (as it is for me), you can take an existing baby picture and print enlargements of each body part and create a layout using these. This technique is especially effective in black-and-white, but you can shoot digital pictures in color and convert them to black-and-white when you make prints.  © Kim Brady
EK Success (www.eksuccess.com) makes a series of Phrase Café clear sticker sheets in dozens of different themes, including “Your Arrival” and “Baby Parts” shown above. I used the Baby Parts stickers to create the following layout of my son’s three-month-old portrait — converted to black-and-white and enlarged to illustrate each of my favorite parts. The background paper is All My Memories Time Savers cardstock in Vintage Beige, which is no longer in production, but available in limited supplies on some clearance websites.  © Kim Brady
Mix & Match Albums My nephew's son (Fireman Trey) loves playing with his toy fire truck. It looks just like his dad's real one at work. I found a product line that fits the fireman theme perfectly, made by collage artist Danny O'Conner (Danny O). O’Conner developed a line of scrapbooking products that includes lots of colorful, three-dimensional cars, trucks and toys. They’re ideal for off-setting the bright reds in this photograph and I was able to choose fun graphics and kid phrases, like "cookies" and "Just like Dad," to remind me of our visit together.  © Kim Brady
Fireman Trey is one of a two-page spread made with Danny O scrapbooking products (www.dannyoart.com/shop). The Danny O products are bright and colorful and perfectly themed for kids who like to play with traditional toy cars, trucks, airplanes and balls. I created the title “Fireman Trey” and caption in Photoshop — giving the type a 3-D effect to resemble the tags (right). Realistically, if you want to start a continuous scrapbook for your new baby, you'll have to do some product mixing to keep generating new pages and ideas. Mixing and matching different products is my favorite part of the creative process. I like browsing through the aisles of craft and scrapbooking stores, looking at the latest color combinations, papers, and embellishments. After years of collecting items from my shopping excursions, I usually feel prepared to piece together just about any layout on a moment's notice. Of course, some pages require more planning than others, like the layout below "Robbie the Kid." I wanted to create a page that reflected the flavor of the Old West, without dominating the image. I had cherished this picture of my first nephew for more than 20 years and knew it was a natural for creating a fun scrapbook layout.  © Kim Brady
In this layout, I wanted to create a page that reflected the flavor of the Old West, without dominating the image. The background “Wanted Poster” paper is a retired paper by Karen Foster Design (www.karenfosterdesign.com), which is still available in stores and on the Internet. The longhorn cattle head and cowboy hat are made from Ellison SureCut Dies (www.ellison.com), available in some scrapbooking, craft or education stores. "Robbie the Kid" and the Texas Rangers logo were both printed from digital files. I used a standard clipart banner to frame the title “Robbie the Kid” and printed them both on colorless vellum paper. Although the Wanted poster paper above is no longer in production, Karen Foster Design and other manufacturers have lots of new Wild West and Cowboy-themed papers, many of which come with coordinated stickers, charms, and cutouts. At the time I created this layout, however, I didn’t have access to the embellishments made to go with the paper, so I used a set of Wild West cutouts made by Ellison SureCut Dies. I layered the light brown cattle head on top of dark brown, leaving just enough of the dark edge showing to create a three-dimensional effect. For the cowboy hat, I traced the original brown cutout onto dark brown card stock, cut it out, and created a layered cowboy hat with a black cord hatband wrapped around the base. I like the simplicity of the solid cutouts. The colors fit perfectly with the mottled background paper, which left lots of room for coordinating pieces. I created the Texas Rangers shield digitally by printing the logo on top of a blank road sign taken from a sheet of Fresh Cuts travel cutouts. For details, read the sidebar at the end of this article: “How to Create a Custom Graphic.”  © Kim Brady
This Halloween layout was created using products from the “Frightful Collection” by Little Yellow Bicycle (www.mylyb.com), scheduled for release Fall 2008. The paper, “Black Swirl,” is textured with black and green glitter along the bottom and randomly throughout the page. Chipboard ghosts and swirls add dimension to the page. The word “GHOSTS” was cut out of the “Halloween Lace Paper” (above, right). There are plenty of child-themed papers and embellishments for making quicker, easier layouts like the Halloween page above. I used products made by a relatively new division of C-Thru Ruler Company called Little Yellow Bicycle, but there are dozens of companies that come out with new Halloween papers and embellishments every year. Having a set of related scrapbooking products makes page layout fast and fun — just make sure that you inspect kits carefully before you buy. Try to determine exactly the number of embellishments that are included before you buy, so you don’t end up running out of supplies before you finish your pages. This is particularly true where letters are concerned. I can’t count the number of times I’ve purchased a packet of chipboard letters to do a layout, only to find out that there were not enough a’s or r’s to spell out a complete headline.  © Kim Brady
This is another relatively new collection from My Mind’s Eye (www.mymindseye.com) from their Confetti division. The kit is called “Celebrate Brothers.” The two 12x12-inch patterned papers have color-coordinated solids on the reverse sides, so you can fold the edges over or cut the papers apart to create your layouts. I suggest buying more than one sheet of each so you can take advantage of this feature. The collection also includes some rub-on and clear-backed trims and titles. Themed papers like the collection above are great, but there are also many single-sheet papers that are perfect for children’s scrapbooking. Choose papers that enhance your pictures without overpowering them, especially when you’re dealing with “delicate” black-and-white images, like this Cheesecake shot from 1960 (below). I was lucky to find an orange and white polka-dot ribbon that looked great on the peach-colored paper, even though the colors weren’t a perfect match. In fact, every element on this page comes from a different manufacturer (see caption below). When shopping for single-sheet papers, I recommend buying at least two of each design, especially if you really like it. You may want to use it for more than one layout or create a reproduction for another member of the family.  © Kim Brady
The peach-colored paper used for the layout above is from an unidentified manufacturer. The solid mats behind the photo and quote are cut from Prismatic textured cardstock, distributed by Karen Foster Design (www.karenfosterdesign.com). The orange and white ribbon is made by Offray (www.offray.com), from their Dashes, Dots, & Checks collection. The “Sweet” tag is made by My Mind’s Eye (www.mymindseye.com) from the Wild Asparagus collection and the two flowers layered on top are made by We R Memory Keepers (https://weronthenet.com/index.shtml). My favorite part of the layout is the poem printed on vellum, made by Quick Quotes (www.quickquotes.com). This company makes quotes on vellum of all sizes, up to full page “Dedications” that you can decorate for the opening page of your scrapbook album. If you have trouble finding color combinations that work well together, you’ll find a great resource at http://kuler.adobe.com/. Adobe Kuler is a color mixing website that lists more than 40,000 color combinations created by Adobe designers and visitors to the site. Log onto the site and you can scroll through thousands of color combinations until you find one that fits the picture you want to scrapbook. Or, you can upload your photo to the website and let the Kuler software choose the perfect color combination for your page layout. Albums My son was well into high school before I started his first scrapbook, so I chose a light blue padded vinyl, 12x12-inch three-ring binder scrapbook made by Hiller Scrapbooks. It's not a traditional post-bound album, but I like the sturdiness and flexibility of the oversized cover, and I can add pages or rearrange the page sequence with minimal disruption of the layouts.  © Kim Brady
This Hiller Scrapbook by We R Memory Keepers (https://weronthenet.com) includes pages from my son’s birth to high school graduation, so I wanted to keep it simple and classic. The metal frame on the cover is made by Marcella by Kay, a line of scrapbooking products that previously handled by K & Company and distributed through Target stores, similar products are also available at Michael’s craft stores. I printed the title “Jonathan’s Story” on beige cardstock and cut it down to fit inside the frame. Since starting the “big book,” I’ve started several themed albums to record Jonathan’s baby years, Boy Scout and school adventures, and world travels. For example, the book shown below is a simple post-bound album that came with the Kodak Baby album kit (above). I used a felt bear greeting card made by Carlton Cards to create a tactile, three-dimensional cover.  © Kim Brady
This simple post-bound album is easily dressed up with a felt greeting card made by Carlton Cards. Important Shopping Tip: Don’t forget to browse the greeting card section for ideas and occasional cool finds like this one. How to Create a Custom Embellishment I created the Texas Rangers shield in my “Robbie the Kid” layout above by scanning a blank road sign from a sheet of Fresh Cuts travel graphics and experimenting with various Texas Rangers logos downloaded from the Internet. I found the star-in-circle logo and sized it to fit in the bottom half of the shield. Then I typed "Texas Rangers" in a font style and size to match the theme. The challenge was how to print the logo directly on the Fresh Cuts graphic. The technique is fairly simple. First, I printed the two-layer logo on a plain sheet of paper, then carefully taped the shield cutout over the printed logo and shield. I taped all the edges to prevent them from catching on the printer roller and reinserted the paper exactly the way I put it in the first time. I turned off the shield layer in my graphic so the logo would print by itself, positioning it exactly the way it looks in the digital graphic.  © Kim Brady
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