One thing about me is that I love to take photos! I don’t think anything in the world can take the place of a photo. Ok, maybe video. But, I get overwhelmed with all the video footage I have amassed. From a very young age, I have enjoyed taking pictures and keeping memories. I remember I was about 7 years old when I got my very first camera. It was one of those long flat cameras that took 110 film. It didn’t have a built in flash. It had these plastic things you could buy and they would flash if you attached it. But, the flash only had limited use of like 4 per flash cartridge. So, you had to be sure you wanted to use the flash before you committed to it. I grew up into a better 35 mm camera. For my college graduation in 2000, I received a digital camera as a graduation present. BIG STUFF!! It was life changing. I could take as many pictures as I wanted. And all it cost was storage. Which was a big deal in 2000! I would take tons of photos and only save the best ones. Since that day in May of 2000, I have probably shot over 100,000 photos.
I started out making little decorated and hand drawn cards to slip into the photo slot of my photo albums. It would tell about the event or what the photos were. I graduated into scrapbooking in high school.
Don’t you just love the theming! I hand stenciled the title. I hand cut the blue flag and drew the six flags on it with white paint pen. I drew the rollercoaster track. Brilliant!! It appears that I used a die cut alphabet of some sort for the Looney Tunes Land title. I used wacko paper and a sticker sneeze of Looney Tunes stickers. So fun! Yet, so bad!!
I continued scrapbooking until I got married in 2000. It just didn’t make sense that I would take a digital photo, print it, and smash it in a book with a bunch of paper. I guess I had a paradigm shift. I began using the Broderbund software (surely many of you remember that!!). It was the software where you could make a poster, sign, cards, etc. It had all the cute clipart. I would make my own picture pages (or at least what I called them). I would put my photos on the canvas that was 8.5 x 11. I would add clip art and a title. I would sometimes even add a little journaling. I slipped them into sheet protectors. I literally thought I had invented a new kind of scrapbooking.
Shortly after my son was born, I began searching online for new clipart for my pages. I somehow stumbled across digital scrapbooking. It was a real thing! And they were doing it better than I was. I jumped on the bandwagon in early 2004. I was hooked! My world made so much sense using digital photos to make digital scrapbook pages. But man of man, those pages were rough!!
I am so glad that this hobby has evolved to where it is today.
As iPhone photography progressed, I began taking more and more of my everyday life pictures with my iPhone. I loved the ability to take photos on the fly. It was a small learning curve, and I began to embrace all that iPhone photography has to offer. This has been a game changer for my memory keeping because it is so much easier to get the shot and tell our everyday life story. If you are looking to up your phone photography game, check out my article on “How to Take Better Pics with iPhone Camera.”
Today, I no longer digital scrapbook per se. I use my iPhone and iPad to create pages and phonebooks. It is my dream come true to “scrapbook” or really to do memory keeping right on my phone. This is a world that speaks to my heart and allows me the freedom to truly capture my memories in an efficient manner while allowing my creative brain to still get to work.