I have written a lot of Click. posts over the years as a WCS team member. I have enjoyed it very much! For this post I went back and looked to see if I have one I liked more than the others. Below you can find my favorite Click. post! It was first posted in October of 2012. Enjoy!
Earlier this week I listened to the latest episode of The digi show (a podcast that shares thoughts and inspiration on digital scrapbooking) and they talked a little about what to do when you are scrapbooking and don´t have photos to go with the story. It got me thinking about which circumstances this can happen and this is what I came up with:
1. If you are scrapbooking older memories for example from your childhood or a trip you took a long time ago.
2. When you just didn´t have the camera around to capture the moment.
3. If you have an assignment to scrapbook something specific, but don´t have a photo to go with it.
I realize that there are many more, but let´s just go with these for now!
In the podcast they talked about using Stock photos, which is basically photos that are licenced for everyone to use. There are online sites that have thousands of free photos, just Google search it. Ok, so Stock photos are not your photos, but can very much help out when you need something for your project.
Celeste Smith tells me that she uses stock photos all the time in her digital scrapbooking. Here she has scrapped about her beloved TV shows. And when I saw this page, I remembered that I actually did this too in my Project Life album earlier this year!
I also have a layout that I made a few years ago where I journaled about infertility. But I didn´t have digital photos from when my daughter was a baby (and not as cute as this!) so I searched and used a stock photo.
What do you think about that? I really have no problem with using others photos, but if you really do want to use your own photos you can easily build up your own portfolio of stock photos. What kinds of photos would you put in that folder? Well, go back and see what you have scrapbooked before. Perhaps you journal alot about your feelings, then pictures of nature often suits the page. Here is an example from my albums.
The title of this page is "If I was in charge..." and has nothing to do with that flower photo really. But I think it can be nice and natural to use nature photos on layouts about anything.
Another tip to build up and use stock photos of your own, is to take photos of everyday kind of things. It can be things around the house or photos of a great pattern etc. So to start with just snap random photos in nature and stuff around your house to just have in your archives.
Ok, that was one way to solve the no-photo "problem". The exact opposite might be to just go with it and make a page without a photo. We did a whole gallery where No photos were requiredin the summer of 2011.
Before I made my page for this gallery I had always envisioned a no-photo layout to be more artsy/artjournal-ish, but boy was I wrong! I loved every layout in that gallery and got a lot of inspiration from them!
You can also take a photo later. For this layout, I really would have wanted to take a photo of the Waterlily in the lake as my journling talks about how magical that nightswim was, alas I didn´t bring my camera. So, I made sure I picked a flower and took a photo of that when I got home. This is also something you might be able to do when you don´t find the right photo from your childhood perhaps. Maybe you have a photo of something else from that time?
Ps. I created a set of photos on Flickr that is filled with my own stock photos. Because sharing is caring!
