The Sparkle of a Photograph

by Halli King

Taking photos is what professional photographers do.  They get the right shot, the right colors, the right exposure, and the shot looks great. When the professional photographer creates the perfect shot, it looks pleasing to the eye, so complete and easy.  One might think, "I can do that!"  Some people can; others, like me, don't always create the best or perfect shot.  Unfortunately, the attitude used to stop me from taking photos.  I would be hesitant to take the shot, in reservation of not getting it just right.

Along came digital and the ability to see what you are taking before it is printed.  Now, people take photos of events that happen in their lives on their phones, cameras, iPads, and other digital devices.  They keep these photos on camera cards and keep the cards, rarely printing the photos they so carefully took.  I too have joined the multitude of picture takers.  I snap pics on the phone without thinking.  I take the digital cameras to special events to record the events.  I may even download these jpegs to a computer to keep track of them.  But am I at the same place as before when I was reserved about taking photos?

We take photos to remember an event that has touched us in some way.  We want to remember the smile, the color of something just so.  If we keep these special photos on a memory card (or hard drive), we can lose sight of the event we wanted to keep.  Memories can fade and with that goes the descriptions of the events we hoped the photograph would trigger.  Print the special photos and write something about the event they are "talking" about.  If the photo is a restaurant, why was it important?  Was the food you ate the reason for the picture, or was it something else?  I took pictures of the door to the kitchen at a restaurant we visited as a family.  Ok, I took several pictures of the door.  Why?  Believe it or not, the children in my family were mesmerized by the opening of the door.  It just seemed to know when someone was approaching the door.  The topic at our meal was about the door, not the food or the fabulous scenery.  On the way out, the waitress showed us the trick...a foot panel that opened the door.  I wrote this story on a card that is with the pictures of the door.  The kids still laugh when they see the picture of the door.  That is, in my opinion, why we take photos and keep them.  The photos are triggers to memories that bring us back to when they were taken.

Take photos.  Print the photos that are the sparkle to the memory.  Write something that goes with the photo so that the sparkle to the memory will be there for others (and yourself) to enjoy for years to come.

I have joined an organization called APPO, dedicated to preserving memories.  I, along with my colleagues, work with clients to help them to preserve the sparkle to the memory.  We work in all types of media: photos, memorabilia, film, digital, printed material, and much more.  We can help you preserve some of the sparkles in your life!

About Halli: 
I have been helping others preserve their photos and memorabilia for 9 years.  When I first started working with photos, I motivated others to work on their photos.  After a few years, I noticed that people just don't have the time to work on their photos.  It wasn't that the photos were not important to them; they just didn't have the time to make the traditional photo albums.  

Our photos and memorabilia document our lives, showing the life we lived and what we valued in our lives.  Taking the time to organize the memories that are important to us and those around us is very significant.  I enjoy when I can help a client take their memories and create something that honors those memories.  That is what Cherish the Photos is all about, placing the memories so that others can 

celebrate our memories, too. I offer help in organizing photos/memorabilia, be photos or jpegs, in creating memory books, memory displays, wall prints and much more! 

Organizing your Photos by Theme

When I ask people why they take photos, most of the time they tell me to remember and to document the important events in their life.  Our photos allow us to re-live our memories and the experiences we shared with our loved ones.   Memories are a wonderful thing....they give us that sense of belonging and significance.  Photography and photo books have given us a unique opportunity.  Our photos tell the world that we were here, and in a photo book we have the chance to tell our stories alongside of those photos.

Over the years though, we've accumulated a lot of photos, and a lifetime of photos can really be overwhelming to sort through.  We talked about the ABC's of Photo Organizing™ in my last blog; now we're going to talk about using themes to help the organization process along as well.

Let me explain what I mean.  If you're trying to create an album using your photos, you don't need every photo.  Nor do you want every photo!  Let's say you are making a graduation album.  Your child played soccer from kindergarten all the way through high school.  You have hundreds of photos.  Wouldn't it be more interesting to look at a couple pages of soccer through the years rather than twenty pages of soccer?

Likewise, if you've got a lifetime of photos, do you think you would enjoy the album more if you concentrated on the themes that were important in your life and focused on those, or if you had every photo you ever took in it?

Go back to the reason you took the photos in the first place! Think of the key themes in your life.  Perhaps your family liked to travel.  Maybe you were really into sports.  What about family traditions?  You can see where I am going with this!

My family loves to ski together.  My children have been skiing since they were 4 or 5 years old.  They learned to ski in Massachusetts, but now we tend to go to Vermont.  However, several times we've taken trips to other places, such as Mt. Tremblant, Winter Park, and Whistler.  This is something we enjoy together.  Our time together skiing has played an important part of who we are as a family.  This is a key theme for us.

What are the themes of your life that you most want to preserve?

Organizing Your Photos Can Be as Easy Using Your ABC's!

If you have boxes upon boxes of printed photos in closets and drawers, and digital photos scattered all over your computer, you're not alone.  Like many others, you probably find yourself somewhat overwhelmed by the task of organizing them.  This process doesn't have to be intimidating though!

Organizing your photos can be as easy as using your ABC's!  At the Association of Personal Photo Organizers, we teach a method called the ABC's of Photo Organizing™, developed by Founder Cathi Nelson, to help people work through the sorting process.    

The first step is to gather all your photos into one spot, whether on the table or on the computer.  Then you'll start making decisions on what to save and toss.  If you have digital photos all over your computer, you might want to consider using Picture Keeper to round up all of your pictures.  All you have to do is insert your Picture Keeper into any USB port on your computer, and it will automatically go and find all of the photos (rather than you having to go find them in various places on your computer yourself!).  This gives you an easy way to corral all those photos, and then you can put them back into the software of your choice to organize them.  Check out About.com's Top Digital Photo Software Picks for Family Photos if you need help deciding which software to use.

Once you've established which software you are going to use for your digital photos, you're ready to move on to the ABC's.  

A is for Album.  Your A photos belong in an album or a photo book.  They are personal and cherished...they have stories behind them.  If you are sorting printed photos, you'll simply place them into an A pile.  If you're working with digital photos, you'll be tagging them with a flag or a rating.

B is for Box.  Not every photo needs to go into an album.  However, that doesn't mean they aren't significant to you.  Your B photos should be organized into an archival storage box.  Printing your photos is the best way to preserve them.  The printed photo is stable, and can last hundreds of years if stored properly.  They aren't susceptible to computer crashes or technical obsolescence.  When you pass away, your relatives are more likely to keep your printed photos than your digital files.  You also should consider using a photo labeling pencil to keep track of the who, what, when on the back of these photos.  

C is for the Can...whether it's a digital trash can or a physical one.  Give yourself permission to throw away the photos you don't need...you know, the blurry ones, the duplicates, the ones with the heads cut off, and the people you no longer know.  With digital photos, I try to download my photos as soon as possible after taking pictures and delete the ones I don't need right away.  Because we take so many more pictures with digital cameras than we ever did with film, we're likely have a lot of duplicates.  If you took 50 pictures of the sunset on your Hawaiian vacation, you probably only need one or two of them.  By paring them down right away, it's a bite size chunk of work versus becoming an overwhelming task if you wait months or years.

S is for the Story.  This is the most important part.  We're a people of stories.  Throughout history we have  used storytelling to communicate and document our lives.  Your stories typically accompany your A photos, and these memories are important to you, your children and future generations.  Sometimes a poorly composed photo is actually significant because of its story.  Consider this picture of this tree from my front yard.  To you, it's just a tree.  But to me, it was our first Christmas tree with our first child. We planted it after the holidays and now its a beautiful evergreen!

Now that you've sorted your photos into the ABC's, you may be wondering what the next step is.  In my next blog, we'll talk about themes and how you can use themes to organize in a way that makes sense for a lifetime of photos.  

The Stories Make the Photo!

My favorite photos are the ones with the great stories and fun memories behind them.

As I look through my old photo books, its fun to relive the memories.  When I create my photo books, I document the stories so my albums really read like books.  Its fun to read them later and look back on the fun times.

Our family has some great memories on the ski slopes.  One of my fondest memories is of the box car races.  There was the school bus box car that got our family into the brochure at Jiminy Peak.  There was the airplane box that didn't make it all the way down the hill, the peace sign box, and many others throughout the years!  The kids have just as much fun building and painting these as they do riding down the hill in them!

I always love watching the antics of my oldest son and his friends.  From creating ridiculous videos to manhunt games that lasted for hours, they always seemed to come up with creative ways to have fun. Once they built a contraption out of a box, a skateboard and a bunch of duct tape.  I'm sure it was completely unsafe but they'd take turns sailing down the hill in it (with helmets on, of course), and it would keep them occupied for hours.  As my husband says, boys will be boys.

I also have some wonderful photos from our trip to Wildwood, NJ a couple summers ago.  The kids had a fabulous time on the boardwalk and my son won some game that got him entrance into one of those freestanding glass rooms where the money flies all over the place.  He didn't really win anything but he sure had a great time in there trying to catch the money!  Then there was the shark scare.  The kids and my husband were all in the water when I spotted a fin.  Someone had a whistle, and we waved everyone out of the water.  My husband insisted it must have been a dolphin, but we found out afterwards they had shark sightings all week along the Jersey shore.  Regardless, I wasn't taking any chances!

Telling the stories make the photos come to life. What stories do your photos tell?  How do you share those memories with your family?