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With the holidays rolling around I thought I would write a quick post on how to get better holiday pictures of your family and friends. Holiday gatherings are a natural place to do all kinds of pictures - especially the most treasured ones like generations of family.

Some quick tips: (Click on any thumbnail to enlarge)

It’s trickier to get a good picture inside - so go outside! With the beautiful fall days around Thanksgiving gather everyone in the later afternoon when the light is softer. Try not to photograph at noon as the sun will be too harsh and high in the sky. If it is really sunny, put everyone in the shade of a house or building for soft, even light.

Think about posing. Instead of asking people to “just get together”, tell them where to stand. Arrange them shortest in the front and taller in the back. Keep families close to each other. Stagger and stack the rows so that you can plainly see everyone’s face - and they can see you. For a fun, memorable shot - do a circle picture like this one.

If you can, plan everyone’s clothing. Coordinated outfits are one the the best ways to get great looking groups pictures. It can be as simple as white shirts and jeans.

Get yourself in the picture. Use a tripod, table, or anything study to hold the camera and learn to use your self-timer feature so you can run around and be in the picture too! But plan where you will stand - don’t want to run around and not have a place to go. (I didn’t run fast enough in the first shot!)

Think about the background. This nice family shot doesn’t need that grass growing out of the kids heads now does it? (That’s what Photoshop and Elements are for.)

Last, share your photos. Print out copies on an inkjet printer or go to a local store to get quick prints. Don’t let them sit on your computer. You might even use them for a Greeting Card from us here at Scrappers Workshop. We are offering standard and jumbo size press-printed Greeting Cards. See our cards here.

Share your pictures with us in our gallery - we would love to see them!

Till next time - Keep Snappin’

Stan

I was working on designing some buttons for my kid’s robotics team competition tonight, and browsing for inspiration, came across this image:

Gave me a chuckle, thought you’d enjoy too.  Personally, I don’t wear butt-floss… but to each her own!

Click on the image (if you have a sec) and leave it’s creator some love!

Have a great day!

Jenn

There are so many time saving tips and shortcuts in both Photoshop and Elements that it’s hard to remember them all. Here’s one I knew and had forgotten:

Here’s some nice journaling I pulled from one of Jenn’s layouts -

To easily select just one word, select your text tool (keyboard shortcut “T”) and double-click on the word. And just that word is selected.

To select a line of text, triple-click on any word in the line. Easy!

To select the entire paragraph, quadruple-click any word and the whole paragraph is selected.

Using any of these tips is a lot easier than trying to select at exactly the point you want and trying to click and drag to select the word or lines you need. Give it a try!

Till next time - Keep Scrappin’

Stan

(type picture courtesy of a Creative Commons license)

Remember Photo Booths? Those magical machines in Five and Dime stores where you sat on the funny hard bench and showed your true self in 4 quick photos. I remember so distinctly the one at our local Woolworth store. My mom, being the practical German that she is, would never allow us to waste our money on a photo booth. So it was a special treat to get to junior high and have a little of my own money to sit down and capture myself and friends in those 4 photos.

We recently went to Dollywood, a local amusement park in Pigeon Forge, TN with our dear friends the Myers. Dollywood has the modern day equivalent to the old chemical-based photo booth - a digital one. Check out some of the neat pictures we took:

There is even a site devoted to the old time chemical-based booths at Photobooth.net and Flickr has a bunch of groups and images.

If you have any, please post them in our gallery and share with everyone!

Till next time - Keep Snappin’

Stan

(Photo Booth picture courtesy of Creative Commons license)

Believe it or not, it’s the world’s first digital camera. It was invented by Steve Sasson at Eastman Kodak (my old company) in 1975. Steve and his chief lab technician took the first digital camera picture in December using their lab assistant as a model. It took 23 seconds to capture the picture and an additional 23 seconds to read off of the cassette tape to a TV to view it. The camera is a whopping .01 megapixel (only 10,200 pixels) and was black and white.

We’ve come a long way since then!

Thanks to Steve Sasson and the vision of the researchers at Kodak to bring us to where we are today.

To learn more about Steve see his blog at Kodak and a Wikipdeia entry.

Stan

Found some GREAT old photos last night, looking at the books with our DD Becky, and decided to make a ‘then and now’ layout for the book I’m working on.  As usual, I was short on time, and wanted to do this quickly!  So…

I was browsing my layouts folder for inspiration, and found this layout:

and I thought it would work with my photos - so I dug up the layered file, swapped out the photos and paper, and had a 5 minute layout that I love!

So - today’s tip is a scrapping tip AND a Photoshop tip…

SCRAP TIP - if you need a quick layout, choose another layout you love, swap out the photos, and papers and elements too if you want, and TADAAA!

PS/PSE TIP - The way I do this quickly, is just choose the layer I’m replacing, (say, a photo layer) then drag the new photo onto the layout.  It will automatically make a new layer just above the old one.  Then I can use a clipping mask and resize it if necessary to make it fit the old layer  (to clip, hover your cursor on the line between the two layers, then hold the ALT key and click!)

Once you do this for all the things you want to change, you can click on the eye to the left of the layer thumbnail to turn off the journaling, and make a new type layer with new journaling.

When you have the layout the way you want it, just SaveAs… a new name!  Save as a .jpg for printing, then save the original file with the new layers in case you need to change something.

Hope this inspires you to revisit and revamp some of your favorite pages!!

Happy Scrapping!

Jenn

DigitalScrapbookingMagazine

I know I’ve been out of the loop, but I just heard about the demise of Digital Scrapbooking Magazine.  CLICK HERE to read the announcement from CK.

I don’t know how I feel about this - I liked having a print magazine I could read on my lunch break at work, sometimes a digimag just isn’t the same.  BUT - I don’t know how much I really liked the mag.  I thought the content was kind of thin.  Anyone else subscribe?  What do you think, is this a loss to the digiscrap community?  What mags do you read, online or off?

We’re home from New York, and want to thank you all for your kind thoughts and comments on Stan’s dad’s passing.  It was as good an experience as can be expected - Stan had some time with his father to say goodbye, we had a lovely memorial service, got to see lots of family and friends.  The trip was arduous though, and we’re glad to be home.

Go hug your family, tell your parents you love them, and have a great weekend!

Jenn and I are not working on the blog for the next few days due to the passing of my dad. He was a great dad, grandfather and husband and we all miss him! I’m going to scrap something about him soon.

Stan

click to see larger image

I just love the journaling on this layout from my digibuddy Marlie!  She did this all herself, just picked key works and gussied them up!  You could use tags, little pieces of ribbon, scraps of paper or cardboard… so many ideas!!  To see Marlie’s layout up close and leave her some love, CLICK HERE

Do you have an unusual way to make your journaling part of the art?  Show us in the gallery, and leave a link in the comments!