We all have them, those photos that don’t really jump out at you for a page, but that you can’t bear to get rid of. Maybe they are way off-center, or have something in them that can’t easily be cropped out, or just don’t show your subject at his best. There are ways around the blemishes! Here are two examples.
In the first one, I shot way too many pictures of my little one without really focusing and waiting on the right picture. It’s because I hadn’t yet read all the tips in the Photography blog! I still wanted to have them on a page, but wasn’t sure how to go about it. One of my good friends is a quilter, and I took some inspiration from a project she was working on. This page was fairly simple. I gathered coordinating “boy” paper and cut out a cardboard template for the rays of the star. Then I cut the paper and photos. They’re all the same size because I used the template. They went together easily. Then I put a circle in the middle. One thing I did that helped to make the page prettier was to use a gel pen to draw “stitching” around the pattern. It makes it pop.
In the second example, I played the name game. None of these photos has anything to do with the others. Each of them had something wrong, but I still liked them. So I cut his name out of them. By themselves, each of these was “blah”. Now they have an identity, something that brings them together. I tied everything together by picking up on the stars in the border of the paper, carrying them throughout the background, and using one of the photos cut into a star as the dot for the i. I haven’t lost the pictures or the memories they evoke – even if those memories, like some of the photos, are cloudy.
What do you think? What clever ideas do you have for those orphaned photos?
Related Blog:
Lisa’s idea to let your kids scrap the leftover photos