So You've Got a Ton of Photos of Baby, What Now?

Long gone are the days when you would think about each snap of the shutter and eagerly take a roll of exposed film to the drug store and wait two days for your prints.  We have become a society of instant gratification, cooing over each and every photo as they are taken, sometimes at the expense of missing an even better shot unfortunately.  If you're like me, your phone is slowly becoming a mobile photo album, constantly going back over old shots, reminiscing about when baby was small(er).

So what do you do with all of these wonderful photos? Of course you can still print them, cell phone cameras are pretty high quality these days and the auto focus usually grabs the right point in the frame, but then what? Buy an actual "Photo Album" to put them in and then find a place on a shelf for the album and bring it out to coo over every once in a while? Not too practical for this modern age of digital consumption.  You could pick a few of your best shots, store them on a memory card and put that card into one of those picture frames that creates slide show.  The problem with both of these ideas is that then the picture is just a picture, it doesn't tell the whole story.

We don't want to think about the one day when we will no longer be around to fill in the gaps about the story surrounding each picture.  As much as we love to take pictures, look at them, and share them with friends and family, the photos we take are sometimes more for our little ones than ourselves.  Have you ever taken the time to go through your parents old photo albums and scan through the faded orange images, trying to make out when and where each photo was taken and the circumstances surrounding those photos? I know that I have.  Sometimes I actually remember those events, or rather remember being told of the events and have now incorporated those stories into my own memory banks as actual memories.  Regardless, it's the stories surrounding the photos that make the memories valuable, not that Kodak paper those pictures are printed on. 

So how does one record those memories and stories to go with the pictures for years and possibly generations to come? One option is to create a digital scrapbook of sorts, using any of the wonderful online options.  Shutterfly will often send out discount codes for a free 20 page album, usually enough for incorporating a good amount of memories.  Remember to incorporate text with your pictures, it doesn't have to be lengthy, just enough to fill in the blanks where the "thousand words" of the picture leaves off.  If you have been taking notes somewhere of milestones, those can be added in with dates around the period of time the pictures were taken. Be sure to incorporate a number of pictures per page to really get the best bang for your buck, and make the album as much of a joy to look at as it was to make.

The other option you have is to take those digital photos and create a video out of them.  There are a lot of free programs that computers come with to create digital slide shows.  Just make sure you have the capability to incorporate text as well (see paragraph above about using text with photos).  You can also put a few recorded soundbites in as well.  Most cell phones have the capability to record audio notes.  Use this as an opportunity for your little one to hear your voice.  If you can easily incorporate some mini videos as well, that will make the entire piece a lot more interesting to watch.  After all, if a video is created with love and energy but no one every gets to enjoy it, it never really exists.

Video editing tips will be in a future blog post.  Be sure to sign of for my mailing list to receive all of my tips and tricks!

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