Week In The Life : Bringing It All Together • The Photos
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Seven little days in a life. There it went.
I always feel a little strange on Monday morning when I wake up and don't start taking photos right away (and a little bit of relief as well). This is an intense, in-depth project. It's a whole lot of work but one of the coolest projects I have created since I started scrapbooking.
Each time I tackle the "putting together" phase of Week In The Life I do things a little different. Today I want to share with you my process for going through my photos
and how I chose which ones to place where, which to enlarge, which
to crop, etc. Some of it will be done after printing, but for the most
part I am going to make a plan before uploading.
This year I'm having Scrapbookpictures.com print my photos vs. printing them here at home. I definitely considered printing at home, since that's what I normally do, but with this many at one time I think it was easier for me to upload. And as you will see later on in this post, I'm pretty sure it was less expensive as well.
Remember this?
I'm still definitely following my design plan for this album. For each day I have a Daily Opener, a baseball card divided page protector (front & back), and a photo collage page.
HELLO PHOTOS
Each night during this past week I uploaded my photos to my computer.
At that time I went through and did a quick delete of any photos that
were obviously not going to be used (triplicates, seriously blurred, mistakes, etc). Since I was taking over 100 photos
per day (and I knew there was no way I would use them all) I was pretty ruthless about which ones I deleted.
NOW HERE'S THE DEAL : I did take around, or over, 100 photos each day of my week. In my experience, 100 photos doesn't really mean "100 photos that I want to frame and hang in my house" or "100 photos that must be crammed into this album no matter what." 100 photos usually means about 20 of Simon & Anna chasing each other and wrestling in the living room...one of which I will use in this project. It means 5 shots of my lunch...one of which I will use. It means 5 shots of Simon and I in the mirror...one of which I will use. You get the point.
Out of 100 photos I average about 30 or less that I really want to use per day. This is the reason that I always encourage people to take more than you think you will use. It's this point in the process that having more is really a benefit because you have more choice when it comes to telling the story of your life at this point in time.
Yesterday I went through all the photos again and got serious. I created canvases, pages, etc (read below) to be uploaded. It took me most of the day to organize, edit, crop, etc. Even though it was a really long day, it is really fulfilling and eye-opening and cool to see a whole week in photos all together in one place.
I encourage you to make a plan for yourself to get this album done. Set aside some time each night to address your photos. One night for deleting. One night for selecting and uploading your daily openers and collage pages. One night for working on your divided page protector pages, etc.
DAILY OPENER PHOTO
As I looked through all my photos to select which ones would be my main image for each day there were definite favorites. Through this process I realized that what I wanted for these intro pages was variety - each one showing a little something different about life right now (the black and white image above will be the opening photo for Wednesday).
I ordered 8, 8x10's that I will crop to 8x8.5 when they arrive (one for each day of the week and one for the intro page).
In years past I have used only photos of myself as the main photo. This year I'm branching out and including a photo of Simon, a couple of Anna, a couple of me, one of food, the one of Chris above, and one with all of us.
There's no right or wrong in choosing an opening photo. If you have a ton of photos you really want to include you might consider creating a collage in the daily opener photo space. For me, I love the enlargements contrasted with all the smaller photos throughout each day.
JUST A NOTE: EMBRACE THE PHOTOS YOU HAVE.This project takes longenough without going through and adjusting every single photo trying to
get it just perfect. Embrace those photos that aren't perfect -
what a great reflection of real, everyday life.
COLLAGE PAGES
Next I attacked the collage pages. I decided to tackle these second, before the baseball card page protector pages, because of the variety of size and orientation and ability to pick just which photos I wanted to be highlighted.
To create my collage pages I used the 8.5x11 digital templates I created for Designer Digitals. The package includes seven different layered templates. My process for this part was simple: open the template, drag photos into Photoshop, mask them into the spaces on the template, save as a jpg and upload to the developer.
So how did I choose which photos to use on the collage pages? The collage pages are really a collection of my favorites photos and/or ones that fit the designed spaces (like the really vertical shot of Simon swimming above). Again I look to create variety and include different times, places, people, colors, etc.
As some of you noticed throughout the week, when I take photos I take almost exclusively horizontal shots. This is just my personal preference. I know coming into this project that I will be cropping many of them. I also know, from expereince, that part of what I love about this project is seeing the "pieces of life/pieces of the whole" that show through the cropped shots.
BASEBALL
CARD PAGE-PROTECTOR PHOTOS
After selecting the photos for the daily openers and the photos for the collage pages I worked on rounding out each day with photos for the baseball card page-protectors.
For uploading to scrapbookpictures.com and for printing I decided to create canvases in Photoshop that were 5 inches x 7 inches. On each 5 inch x 7 inch canvas I was able to fit 4, 2.5 inch x 3.5 inch photos.
For most days I ended up with about 12 (there's 18 pockets available) photos which will leave room for the journaling cards and other "stuff" I collected throughout the week.
I tend to follow a pretty simple cropping and saving procedure in Photoshop. Here's a video tutorial that walks you through that process (click to view larger on Vimeo):
Ali Edwards Week In The Life : Photo Crop Tutorial from Ali Edwards on Vimeo.
Here's the written how-to for Photoshop Elements:
Here's a look at a couple of those 5 inch x 7 inch canvases:
I love these 2.5 inch x 3.5 inch photos. They really do round out the album in terms of filling out the rest of each of the days. Again, think pieces of the whole.
PRINTING COST
One of the questions I am often asked is related to printing at home vs. uploading to a developer.
After uploading my completed photo pages to Scrapbookpictures.com the total cost was $30.85 (including $3.99 for the shipping option I selected). This cost included the following:
9, 8x10's (I added one additional photo that I want to frame)
18, 5x7's (photos for the baseball card page protectors - 4 to a page for a total of 72 images after trimming)
7, 8.5x11 (the collage pages)
I know that is significantly less expensive than purchasing new ink cartridges for my printer. I'm looking forward to seeing how the pages all turn out and hoping that the sizing is all correct. I'll give you an update on that in a couple of days.
In the meantime, while I wait for my photos to come home, I'll be putting other pieces of the album together. Tomorrow's post will cover that process.
Click
here for a complete list of Week In The Life posts.
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129 comments
You might need to scroll down a bit when selecting the page size. It came up for me yesterday for my images that were 8.5x11 (when editing from your shopping cart).
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Ali, I read this excerpt of a speech by Orson Scott Card (author of Ender's Game, among others) which he gave this past weekend in DC and it made me reflect even deeper on the concept of story-telling and the power of the story and your wonderful encouragement to tell our stories. After taking your Yesterday/Today class I'm seeing "stories" in a very new way. Reading this speech helped me realize that our little personal stories really are part of a bigger, global picture. I thought he had some interesting thoughts, surely worth pondering and discussing. http://www.meridianmagazine.com/ideas/100426dismantlingprint.html
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Ali,
First, your pictures look great! I am so glad you will be explaining Photoshop in detail, I as well as some of the others are unclear on how to use it, & get frustrated.
Next, I would love some advice. The last two days of my WITL, I hardly took any photos, (maybe 3 each day) They are not even anything great.I don't have a reason why I just didn't. What do you think I could add or do? Because of this I feel like maybe I should not complete it, because it won't be as good as the beginning of the book... I really do not want this to becoming "another unfinished project" I would love any advice you might have.
Lastly, if you don't mind me asking, I would love to know where you found your bedding, I LOVE IT!!
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Hi Ali, I am really enjoying this project! I am concerned that I won't be able to finish it this week, and that it will end up an abandoned project. That said, I am willing to try whatever I can to make it easier. Do the templates that you have at designer digitals really make it as simple as you describe. Just drag and drop? I just want to go for it, but at $24.99, I'm hesitating. I know there was a sale at DD very recently, last week or so, but is there a chance these will be discounted again soon?
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This was a great post. I am always torn on printing at home versus ordering and I like how you broke it all down with what you did. It really helps a lot...with future projects too ;)
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Give yourself permission to not have to finish it this week...and permission to spread it out...with a COMMITMENT to finish it soon :). How about that LOL? I do think the templates make it easier if you have some working knowledge of Photoshop or Elements. I am working on a video tutorial so you can actually see the process today. Maybe wait to watch it before deciding about the templates?
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i love reading about your process ali! thanks for sharing all this with us. it was a ridiculously hard project for me personally (and emotionally, which wasn't something i expected)...but i just know that years from now i'll be so thankful i did it.
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Why not just do 5 days instead of 7? Nothing wrong with that at all :). Take what you have and make something with that!
And thanks about the bedding - it's from Pottery Barn. They have really great sales in the store that I stalk :).
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Hi Deirdre - those photos on the wall are all 8x10. You know, the album might hold two years worth...it all depends on if you add things that are bumpy or if you are keeping things really flat. The more flat your pages, the more you can fit into one album.
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My birthday happened to fall during this week, so I can tell you it's a pretty cool way to document your birthday. I almost choose to do this during a different week, fearing that the specialness of a birthday would skew the ordinary week I was trying to capture, but it's just the opposite. I ended up with a super ordinary birthday - one of the nicest ever! I love your idea to make it a tradition!!
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Oh that looks really interesting Shauna - thank you for the link.
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Thanks Bev and Ali for explaining it in Picasa. It worked!
I now have my photo collages and know how to make them again for other scrapbook pages/projects. It was super simple and yielded such dramatic results!
Terri
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Oh Ali, thanks for doing what you do. I just watched today's vimeo. I learned more in 8 minutes (and without frustration!) than I can figure out on my own in a couple hours. I always get inspired to create (and sometimes actually do create ;)) when I read your blog.
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I LOVE how many lengthy comments have been left on this entry - and this whole project in general, here and elsewhere (it was great fun to see Cathy Zielske's album and others evolving alongside). All of these shared thoughts, stories, struggles and insights give me a great feeling of connectedness, if that makes sense, and turn this week in the life project into something even more special to me. Wonderful. Thank you to Ali for initiating such a great group project and thanks to all of the other participants for sharing so freely. Crazy good!
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Ali, you rock! :) I have been (and still am) so excited about this project. I am looking forward so much to your posts this week about putting it all together.
I have pages and pages of detailed journaling for each day, so I'm really thinking about how to organize my album. I don't want to edit the journaling down too much, but I want there to be a balance between photos and journaling (and I don't want to have to print 10 pages for each day). :)
I love the black and white photo of your husband. I'm amazed at how you transformed the original. Are you planning to use a b&w for each opening photo?
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Thanks so much for the video tutorial. . .I'm new to my Photoshop Elements program. . .and you spelled it all out PERFECTLY (especially with the reiteration of the process using a second photo. . .I felt really confident that I could guess the correct upcoming step as you went through it a second time). :)
So thank you ~ thank you ~ thank you! :)
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Perfect - thanks Ali, am loving the tutorial for getting 4 photos onto a 7x5 but I am stuck! I change the resolution to 300, then go to change the height to 3.5" and it changes the resolution itself to 781.something!- what am I doing wrong? thanks again x
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An idea for showing those routines that don't happen for one reason or another: take a photo, or use a photo you already have, of the activity, and add it to the day. My kids' soccer games got rained out, so I'm putting soccer photos in with the caption, or note, "Normally we do this", "but today we did this instead". Same for boy scouts last night. My son has it every Monday, but not last night. Gonna take a pic of him in his uniform with the same labels or caption.
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Hi Ali, I usually create a collage at Walgreens, but I really like Scrapbook Pictures.com - they're work is really great! I am a little confused though - am considering Aperture, but think I will wait until I purchase an SLR. Do I need Photoshop Elements in order to do digital scrapbooking? (I have an Apple). Can I create something with templates in what sounds like a free program - Picasso? Can I skip these altogether and just do the collage on the developer's web site? I don't like to buy programs and then not use them and I recognize there is a huge learning curve. I am thinking I would like to do more with digital/traditional scraping so before I buy any programs, I should really know what route to go with software.
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Hi Ali, I usually create a collage at Walgreens, but I really like Scrapbook Pictures.com - they're work is really great! I am a little confused though - am considering Aperture, but think I will wait until I purchase an SLR. Do I need Photoshop Elements in order to do digital scrapbooking? (I have an Apple). Can I create something with templates in what sounds like a free program - Picasso? Can I skip these altogether and just do the collage on the developer's web site? I don't like to buy programs and then not use them and I recognize there is a huge learning curve. I am thinking I would like to do more with digital/traditional scraping so before I buy any programs, I should really know what route to go with software.
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