Five Baht Elephant

my crafty home

2013 Photobook Status

One of my goals this year is to get my photos off my computer, and printed into photobooks. I’ve made specific ones for certain events and as gifts for family. I’ve been working all year on a 2013 photobook (I made one last year as well), and as of this morning, I’m 42% complete.

Yes, I use a spreadsheet to keep track of my progress.

Yes, the sheet calculates how much of the year I’ve documented.

PL-Tracking-Sheet

 

What can I say? I love spreadsheets.

I use Lightroom to organize my photos, and I filter my photos by date. It makes it easier for me to focus on just that week and choose photos for the album. I build the pages in Photoshop, using templates from Becky Higgins and digital scrapbook kits from Paislee Press. Within Lightroom, I can send photos to Photoshop and back to Lightroom pretty easily.

PL-LR

I take notes each week, and record them in my notebook.

daily capture

This morning, I worked on weeks 19 and 20. You can see week 20 below.

Week 20Week 20 Left

Week 20 Right

 

I’m hoping to get the year documented by the end of the year. Meaning, in the next 4 weeks, I need to catch up.

It is a lot of work, and most of the time I enjoy the process. Some of the time it feels like a chore. After working all week, mostly in front of a computer, the last thing I want to do is sit in front of my computer here at home. There are some weekends where I don’t even turn it on.

But I love looking through my photobooks. I love when family comes to visit, and they look through the photobooks. I love doing them digitally and that the books don’t take up much space. And I can re-print them if I need to.

It took me awhile to refine my process. But now, documenting the little things is a habit. Recording the highlight of the day, or a funny thing Miles said, the songs he’s singing or the books he’s reading – all go in my notebook. I love looking back, and I know that 10 years from now, I’m going to love looking at this book.

 

A Project of Epic Proportions

I have way too many photos that are stuck on my computer or external hard drives. And I really want to have these photos out and in the real world. The past year I’ve made a real effort to put together photobooks and print them. Since this time last year, I’ve made 4 photobooks. A trip to France, 2012 in Review, a weekend with some girlfriends and a family trip to the Grand Canyon – all printed, bound and displayed on a bookshelf. Awesome.

I decided to start on Miles’s baby book. Yikes. I have thousands and thousands of photos. First, I’m a photography enthusiast (ok, nerd) and second, this is my first and only child. Thousands of photos is not an exaggeration. I also have a folder of his baby ‘stuff’ – ultrasound images, hospital paperwork, handouts from his baby wellness checks – that I want to include too.

I’m going to do his book chronologically, starting with his birth day. I’m not sure how much of his first year I’ll include, but it will definitely

A bit about my photo organization. I use Lightroom for pretty much everything photo related. I organize, edit, export for print, export for the blog, upload to Facebook, upload to Flickr, upload to Shutterfly, make photobooks and whole bunch of other stuff all from Lightroom. I can make photo collages in LR as well, but I usually send them to Photoshop  and a copy of the edit comes back to Lightroom. Its a super powerful program, and I’ve been using it since 2007. I love it. The great thing about LR is that its a non-destructive editor. Any changes, edits, tags etc that you make in LR is stored in the database, called a catalogue, and won’t change the original photo file.

My 2009 and 2010 photos are on an external hard drive, and to make this process easier for me, I created a new LR catalogue titled “Miles” that just references the actual photos on the external drive. So far, I’ve gone through and edited and then exported the initial batch photos I plan to include.

So far, I’ve got 10 pages.  And, man. My baby is almost 4 years old. I’m looking at these photos in disbelief. I don’t remember him being this small. I’m really happy I’m finally putting this together.

Here’s a sneak peek.

miles photobookmiles photobook-3miles photobook-2

I’m Trying to Grow Tasty Vegetables. In Boxes. Its Hard.

july garden-3

But it is exciting!  When my first little tomato showed up, I ran around the back yard a few times and then did a happy dance. Miles looked at me like I was crazy. Then he started dancing too. It really was as cute as it sounds.

And then when JJ got home, I didn’t even give him a chance to settle in. I dragged him outside and was all, “LOOK! ITS A TOMATO!” He was happy for me, but he really did look at me like I was crazy.

And my poor leaning tomato plants. Next year I’m going to plant them in the 5 gallon buckets and rig up a better support system.
july garden-2
I call this box the “hot mess box”. I’m pretty sure I way overplanted this one – jalapeno, bell pepper, cilantro, sugar snap peas and cucumbers.  And the cucumbers have choked out the peas. And I’m not sure why the leaves are all yellow like – over water? Under water?

july garden
We harvest and use the mint a lot for our summer cocktails. Yum!  And the basil has looked sparse since I introduced Miles to it.  “I eat da basil!”  as he tears the leaves off the plants.

I do like these boxes. Its nice to not have to water them every day.  And reassuring to know that the roots are getting enough water even if its 95+ outside. But, man, I’m stressing out about the tomatoes! And the hot mess box! And I’m impatient! I want a tomato!

And you probably want me to cease work on the exclamation points!!!!

Project Life: Week 5 (yes, I’m behind)

I spent 40 minutes on these pages.  Which is probably a bit longer than I want. It was the last week of January and we didn’t do anything super special. I need to remind JJ to text me photos from his outings with his friends. You’ll note that he’s not in any photos from this week. I promise I did better in February!

week 5

week 5 left

week 5 right

I’m glad that I’ve been taking notes throughout the week.  And I’m glad that Lightroom allows me to sort my photos by date.

I really like Colour Lovers and their pattern maker.  It took me about 3 minutes to make the chevron pattern I used for this week’s layout.  I pulled the colors from this palette

is_it_spring
Color by COLOURlovers

for the pattern and album pages. Colour Lovers allows you to download the pattern image at different sizes. I chose the largest one they offered and then threw it into Photoshop. I will definitely make more patterns to use in this photobook.

 

 

 

Project Life: Weeks 1 & 2

One of my goals this year to get my photos off my computer and printed into a photobook.  For 2013, I decided to go with Project Life.  I bought the photoshop templates and have been making my own filler cards, journaling cards, date stamps and other digital elements in Illustrator. 

Here are the first two weeks of this year:

Left side:

and right side:

And week 2:

Left side:

and the right. Which, isn’t 12×12 but more of a 10 x 12.  And I didn’t realize that until I went to put them together. I’ll figure out how to fix that when I go to print.

I’m sure my process and workflow will improve as I continue with this project.  I take photos mostly with my iPhone, but some with my Big Camera.  I jot notes down in my Moleskein while I’m at work, trying to remember the details of the days – what Miles is saying, what we’re eating/watching/reading. 

I work on the pages on Sundays.  I sort, rate and edit photos in Lightroom.  I’ll keep both PS and LR open, going back and forth between the two to piece together the pages.  I’ve created PS actions for the operations I do often (resizing, extending canvas) which greatly speeds things up for me. 

I hope I can keep this up for the year. 

2012 Photobook. Finished.

and on order. 

I started this photobook quite some time ago.  I already upload most of my photos to a family share site on Shutterfly, so I thought it’d be easier to throw it all in a book on their website.  And this week photobooks are 40% off, so I rushed to get the last half finished.  Oh, and free shipping for orders more than $30.

I used their custom path tool with the Project Life Clementine Edition theme.  It was easy. And I’m done.

And I’m more concerned with being done than with it being perfect.

Click here to view this photo book larger
Shutterfly allows you to customize your photo book just the way you want.

France Photobook Sneak Peek 2

All righty. I think I’m almost finished with our vacation photobook.  I still have the front and back covers to finish.  Oh, and I’ll need JJ to decipher his “10 Things I Noticed About the French” list that he jotted down in our travel notebook.  He has horrible handwriting, and I can’t figure out what he wrote.  At all.

This book was a lot of work.  And there were times I sat down to work on it, but quickly gave up.  After sitting at my desk for my day job, the last thing I wanted to do some evenings was sit in front of my computer.  Even if it was doing something I enjoy – editing photos. 

I’ve learned so much about InDesign, but there is still more that I don’t quite know.  Which is ok.  I got through making the book, and 95 pages in about 3 weeks is pretty good. I think at least. 

Here are a few of the 2 page spreads:

France Photobook, Part 1

Recently, I had 2 photo books printed up at Blurb and they turned out great!  Paper and print quality were great. Price was reasonable.  And Lightroom 4’s Book Module that directly uploads to Blurb made it super simple.  LR has a number of built in templates for a photobook, but for our recent France vacation I wanted more flexibility in putting it together. 

Blurb has a plug-in for Adobe InDesign which creates the templates for you and then allows you to upload the finished book to their site to order. Easy, right? Except I’ve never used InDesign.  So, with the help of Lynda I’m learning the program while organizing the text and photos that will be part of the book.

I carried around a small Moleskine notebook and jotted down notes throughout the trip. I told JJ that I intended to add more story to our photobooks and that I needed his help. He was all for it, grabbing the book at times and adding his own observations and thoughts.  Its great, however he has horrible handwriting so there’s going to be a lot of follow up questions I’ll have for him! I’m glad we did this, because now I’ve got a lot of prompts to help with the writing.

As far as photo organization? *sigh* I take a lot of photos.  I thought for awhile how I’d approach this. I took 1200+ photos using 3 different cameras – my big d700, my little point and shoot and my iPhone. I put JJ in charge of the P&S – I’m hardly ever in any photos because I’m usually the one behind the lens. Giving him his own camera helped with including me in the photos though I did have to give him a crash course in composition. For example, he had the Eiffel Tower growing out of my head. I told him that did not make a good photo. He now gets it *smile*

It took two episodes of Fringe and a very large glass of wine to get the good ones picked out and ranked in my LR library.  There is no integration between LR and InDesign, which makes sense to me, but I won’t go into explaining here.  Knowing that I’m going to have to export the photos jpgs or tiffs before adding it to the layouts I decided to process the photos in small batches.  I plan to build the pages a spread at a time.  This might be the way most people do it, but I probably would have edited all the photos in one sitting and then throw them onto the pages.  And then hope for the best. 

So, right now, I’m about halfway through Day 1.  I’ve been using more and more of the Develop module in LR and getting a bit creative and more courageous with my editing.  Here’s an example, a before and after.  I primarily used split toning to achieve this effect.

253.jpg

This book is going to be amazing. I just know it.

Stay tuned for more updates and sneak peeks.

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