Before iPhone cameras became awesome, I took photos differently. That’s not news – we all did. But I have been an avid photographer for a long time, so I generally had a digital camera bout my person most of the time, even before it was part of my smartphone.
I took fewer photos than I do now, but I still took plenty, and I liked to be able to present them in a format that was pleasant to browse through, and easy to reach for.
Photo books were the answer for me.
Each year I would compile a bunch of shots that represented the main events in our lives…
… and also do a couple of ’round up’ pages of crafts, food, garden, and other general categories.
These are nice snapshots of the years they represent. They have fewer details of everyday life than my current pocket pages projects do, and I think they’re the poorer for that, but they document the big stuff, and that makes them special.
I actually still make photobooks, but they’re just about Arty. I take a lot of photos of him and I can’t include all of them in the scrapbooks, so I make a yearly round up of all my favourite photos of him and have it printed and bound. I adore these little books, and Arty really likes looking at pictures from when he was a baby, or “only two” (he says, from the venerable age of four).
It’s really wonderful watching him grow up before our eyes as we look through the pages.
Have you ever made a photo book and had it professionally printed? Or do you prefer getting prints and sticking them in a photo album?
P.S. If you’re interested in more stories about the roots of my memory keeping, you might want to have a look at my travel chronicles.