Filling the silence with digital scrapbooking

Sam has been away for a few days now, and although there are some very good things about this (having the bed to myself, being able to watch my programs whenever I want, not having to watch football, Arlo not waking up at the crack of dawn when Sam shuts the front door on his way to work), there is still an awful lot of silence.

The worst time of day is at around 5pm, the time Arlo and I are usually getting ready for Sam to return home from work. My approach to this time of day has been to turn on the radio for some conversational background noise and busy myself with a task until it’s time to start Arlo’s dinner / PJs / bed routine.

I’m not really in the habit of spending time on my computer in the evening unless I’m behind with client images. I’ve usually reached brain-dead status by that point, and it’s nice to spend the hour or so before bed with Sam watching one of our TV shows. Plus, Sam is pretty deaf is one ear and finds it hard to hear the TV over the roar of my computer, so I feel bad when it’s on.

But he’s not here, so I can have my computer on and watch TV all I like, and it’s provided the perfect opportunity to resume work on Arlo’s photobooks, which have been severely neglected recently – they are always at the bottom of the to-do list.

This is the 1 – 2 years phone collage, when I’d only had Instagram for part of the year. There will be a lot more photos for the 2 – 3 year phone photo collage! By the way, if you want to find me on Instagram, my name is @this_is_chloe

And how the pages will look side by side in the book:

All images are saved as a hi-res JPEG ready for printing, and as PSD files in case I decide to change anything later down the line. I’m naming the files by month, then year, then a description of the page, ie, May2012woods. The plan is that this will make it easier for me to arrange all pages in chronological order when it gets to the stage of actually putting the books together.

I’m still no where nearer to having a book ready to print, as I’ve been working on all three years at once (0-1 year, 1-2, and now we also have 2 -3 to get on with). By far the best way to keep on top of all of this would be to create a page as soon as I’ve edited those particular images. Seeing as I’ve just started to realise this, it’s too late for years 0 -1 and 1 – 2, but I’m starting to do this now for Arlo’s 2-3 year book, and for the more recent images from summer that are still fresh in my mind.

It’s a long old project, but so worth doing, and I know that once we finally get round to printing the finished product, these photobooks will be some of our most treasured items.

Click the scrapbooking tag to see more of my photobook pages.