Scraps Away!: photscrapping

What to do with a bazillion photos of your first-born?

We're new parents, so like the tourists in a new country, Mr. F and I can't get enough of clicking away at Oona's every moment.

With today's technology, taking pictures are easy, hence the tendency to having an avalanche of captured moments. You can only look at so much later on and the rest are stuffed in a computer file folder marked: DO NOT DELETE ON PAIN OF DEATH.

You can't possibly print everything. (So very expensive, as I found out) and unfortunately, you can't bear to throw the excess away, no matter how identical six or sixty pictures would look to the next sixty.

Because you would know THE DIFFERENCE.

It would feel almost like a betrayal, casting aside the frozen memory of your little one like it was nothing.

I'm a parent now, so sue me for the drama!

So, what to do, what to do?

In the old days, there were the usual Kodak or Agfa prints and those free cardboard albums. Then Mom would religiously transfer them to nicer plastic bound albums with plastic sleeves. Or if it were a special occasion on celluloid, the big fancy albums with self-adhesive acetate and cardboard pages would be the trophy of the day.

In even older days, the photo albums were bound pages with white-edged photographs neatly arranged by the lady of the house. Handmade albums, usually with ribbons and other whimsy, were elegant in heavy paper and memories were a lot more formal in presentation.

Photographs of course were a lot more expensive in our grandparents' age hence the special care in the preservation and presentation of what amounts to a family heirloom. Maybe a lock of hair or a leaf pinned to a photo, a scrap of cloth imbued with memories stirred by a touch. Albums in those days were more scrapbooks, bits and pieces of lives put together to tell a story to the next generation. They had more personality than the plastic, ready-made albums in vogue nowadays.

You can tell where I'm going with this, can you?

So the next best thing if you can't keep your trigger-finger away from the shutter button would be to scrap them all together!

*applause!*applause!*

This blog started that way. Bazillion photos. Little Cash. Lots of Photoshop and Scrapping time. Today's technology in the time-honored tradition of creating your own albums and giving them a little bit of digital personality and pizzaz.

More bang for my buck too since I can scrap together as much photos as I can, arrange it on a nice page with the elements of my choosing and have the whole shebang printed. Ten photos on a page with all the trimmings? So very nice.

And I don't have to feel like such a traitor for trashing anything!

Parental guilt GONE...totally scrapped to oblivion!

{Credits: Shabby Princess Piece-A-Cake In The Groove Album}