Recently, this question in the forum by Starling made me think hard about the question of having few or worse, no, photos of an important event – one you really want to have a page of in your Scrapbook to remember? Maybe the camera was left at home & you had to rely on other peoples photos – we all know how hard it can be to get those from them ? - the camera malfunctioned, light was really bad, or it was an occasion where you did not realize the significance at the time – maybe sadly, the last time you saw someone alive? There are all sorts of reasons why, and these are just a few ideas to get you started on making a great page.

First off, one really good picture, well displayed, can make a great statement – much better to go with ONE good one than lots of mediocre ones. If you only have one photo it must be the focal point of your layout - this is usually easier if you enlarge it so that it takes up most of your page - with digital photos, as long as it is taken at a high resolution (you do always do that don’t you?) this is usually easy.

One thing I try to avoid, particularly with heritage photos, is cropping too much; you can easily loose important location details with these. Even with "everyday" photos - say you have a day at the beach, to me it is important to retain a sense of which beach, and for this you need some background. Try highlighting the "important parts" with a frame, tags, slidemounts, making them into postage stamps - an example of a page where I did this is here.

If it is a heritage photo that you want to enlarge, try scanning at a much higher dpi - I have used up to 600 dpi. or another way is to photograph the photo - switch off your flash & choose a good natural light, and if you have it super macro mode. Many photo labs would do it for you if you find you do not have success. Using a program like Photoshop, it is also possible to resize a photo, but don't be tempted to enlarge much by simply dragging out the corners - you will end up with a very pixilated image - the secret is to go up little by little - Image > Image size and increase by about 10% each time - in this layout I increased a little black & white photo (taken with my first camera – a Brownie Box) to take up a large are of an 8 x 10 LO very successfully - just experiment!

Few photos mean more space for much more detailed journaling – this is your chance to tell the whole story! We recently had a sad event, in our garden we had a litchi tree – beautiful to look at and each year it produced the most wonderful crop of delicious sweet litchis. It started looking very sad, and we found that it was full of bored & it had to be cut down – in the middle of the cutting down process I suddenly though that this tree needed a page – it had been part of our lives for over 20 years – I rushed out and photographed what was left of it, found a few old & tiny photos to add interest, and did this layout, documenting the whole story & “pinned” it on the tree.

If you are not good with journaling using some of the beautiful Word Art or overlays available in The Shop here at DSP – they can fill a large part of your page, and make one photo into a beautiful statement - I have used an overlay for this photo of our little grandson, Josh.

Another great way to use one photo is to use it more than once – here I have used the photo as it was, then I used my lasso tool to (really roughly too, took no time!) to remove Kate from her background. I then flipped the image blended it with the background. Added some of Tina’s beautiful Word Art and I had a layout which I love in no time at all!

My layout, Run, Ray, Run! Shows another way to use one photo - repeat the photo when you really want to emphasize it – we recently had a holiday in Namibia & my husband Ray, wanted to photograph us in front of a HUGE baobab. In order to fit it all in he had to get miles back from the tree, too far for the remote to work, so he had to rely on the timer – the camera took a photo as he ran to get into position, getting a glorious photo of his bum - a moment I could not let pass! So, I repeated the same photo in a filmstrip, varying sizes to give the feeling of movement and to further emphasize the funny moment.

Trying to take a really good photo of an event when children particularly are involved can also give one a headache! They will not smile when they should, and do all sorts of things which they shouldn’t – when you are finished and looking through the photos which you did get – don’t discard the “bad” ones too quickly – is there not something, even a part of one that you can salvage? Or can you not turn it around and change the proposed topic of the layout? An example of this I had recently, was trying to photograph Josh in his Santa hat – I wanted a great LO of him in his hat, but he had other thoughts – he wanted Teddy to wear the hat. I managed to get one, half decent shot, but an adorable one of him putting the hat on teddy, the resulting layout really has far more meaning & memory value for this & I know we all love the little pic best of all!

One photo layouts are, of course, a perfect time to use special techniques as the photo will not be competing for attention. We all have artistic effects and filters galore in our programs – this is a great time to give them a whirl – remember if you don’t like the effect, it is easy to press the undo button – some of our best work comes about in the process of experimentation – a beautiful example of one photo used artistically was done by Angie. This was her note in the forum on how she achieved this stunning page “Well, I first used my all time favorite filter “Virtual Photographer” on both photos. The filter I used was Hollywood, which gives it a deep blue color. The bottom photo I used a layers mask to hide parts of it to blend it into the top photo. I used a very soft edge brush to blend the edges of the photo.
But I did have to clean up both pictures first using the patch and clone tools.
It just happened that on these photos the filter darkened just where I wanted it to sometimes you just get lucky.”

No photo? Someone or something missing? Even more of a challenge but it can be done! A couple of ideas -
Margie did a lovely page after 911, replacing the missing twin towers with text.

When my Kate got married she paid a beautiful tribute to the most important ladies in her life & I wanted to preserve the memory on a page, but had no really nice photo of her making the speech, so I used the bouquet as a softened background & placed the text in a shape to echo the bouquet. If you would like to see this page & read the full story it is here.
I have seen lovely layouts where the whole page is just about the journaling – maybe a misty view of the subject of the layout……..

I hope some of these ideas help you when you next stuck with few photos - don’t let be put you off – let your creativity run free & create a great page!

© 2005 Meryl Bartho