I am presently organizing 2011 photos to make photo books for my children this Christmas. It has become a tradition that they all enjoy. Their photo book is the first thing they look through on Christmas morning.
But I must say, I, we, they, take a lot of photos. This year I scanned all of my negatives up until we purchased a digital camera. We didn’t have half the photos that we have from a digital camera. When I took photos with a film camera, I was very careful about what I was taking because I only had so much film in the camera, and it cost money to develop that film. After having children I had to really think about what photos to take because I needed to have doubles developed so that there would be enough photos to go around in all the photo albums.
But with digital cameras, you can take as many photos as you like, especially now that flash cards have grown in gigabytes. Every time I download photos to my computer, I open Adobe Bridge and clean out any extraneous and duplicate photos, and I “still” have tons. And because I have so many, they all become important. It’s really quite difficult to choose between two or more good shots.
Then creating the book and deciding how many photos on each page is another big choice. I have to go back and “decrease” the number of photos on a page because too many are similar, or the photos are too small because there’s too many photos on a page. And you always want to get your money’s worth in the end. These books are pricey.
We live in an age of overload. With all of the technology we enjoy today, we tend to go overboard and end up having too much of just about everything. Simplify, simplify, simplify.
