Digital Scrapbooking: Part 2 - From Paper to Digital

I started out scrapbooking over 12 years ago. In my first post about scrapbooking, I talked about the paper years. You can go here to check it out and get caught up.

In 2004 I bought my first digital camera. As a photographer, I had resisted going digital as I felt that it was not as good as film. But by mid-2004, the digital SLR cameras were out and fairly reasonable and I decided it was time. (If anyone is interested, I can talk cameras in another post - just let me know.) It took me awhile to get used to the camera, how to get the pictures I wanted and knew I could get with film, etc. I printed my pictures through my local lab just like I had been with my film. And then just scrapbooked the 'normal' way - on paper in books.

The problem was that digital allowed me to take so many more pictures that I had with film. And, the thing is, all of my friends and former customers (I sold Creative Memories for five years during my paper scrapbooking days) would tell you that I already took LOTS of pictures with film. So, basically, the number of pictures I had with digital was tons!

Why was this a problem? Because there was no way I could afford to print all of these pictures out. Nor did I really want to. But I also grew weary of all the extra steps in the process of scrapbooking. For example, with film, I printed everything. I would gather all the related pictures, figure out how I wanted them on the page, ditch the ones I wouldn't use (almost as many as I did), then scrapbook them.

Now with digital there was the added step of culling through the digital pictures and deciding which to print. On the surface this doesn't sound like alot of work. But for me, each time I look at a set of pictures I can come up with a different way I'd like to use them. So it was very difficult to decide which pictures I would want to use at some point in the future when I had time to scrapbook. It was all too time-consuming and I just didn't do it. I ignored it.

So my friend convinced me to try out digital scrapbooking. And I became hooked.

Just like with paper scrapbooking, there are so many different ways to digitally scrapbook. In my next post coming tomorrow I will detail the process and products I use today.