Creating Memories Archives - Page 2 of 5

Sep 22 2016

No Picture? No Proof? Photos Capture The Stories of Our Lives

This is a Guest Contribution by Lori Krause, Photo Life Manager, and member of the Association of Personal Photo Organizers.

No Picture? No Proof?

Now that’s a loaded statement! And can be interpreted a couple of different ways. But we’ll get back to that in a minute. First, let’s talk about why we take pictures.

Or why I take pictures.

I am not a professional photographer, far from it! I don’t know my aperture from my aspect ratio, much less anything about shutter speed. What I do know is that I’ve always enjoyed capturing important people and moments in my life through photography. But until about 6 years ago, I didn’t realize that I was also capturing proof.

The 50th Wedding Anniversary

In 2010, my in-laws were celebrating their 50^th wedding anniversary. I was asked to scan their family pictures and slides so the siblings could put together a video for the celebration party. While I was at it, I also scanned all of my pictures as well. How many times have you found a picture and thought, “Oh my goodness, I had forgotten all about . . . ?” I had a lot of those moments!

Like, “Oh, wow! There’s my husband heading to a fishing tournament in a sweatshirt he printed with one of the first color printers!”

or “Look, there’s the picture of my goofy son who won first place in a baby contest.”

But it wasn’t enough for me to remember those moments, I wanted the ability to find those pictures and share the moments with others. So, while I was scanning, I also set up a system in my computer to organize, the now thousands, of photographs. I can pretty much find any picture within a couple of minutes.

OK, so I can find the pictures quickly, but what stories do they tell? What are the memories and how can I share them today?

If there is no picture, is there no proof? #saveyourphotos Click To Tweet

Yesterday’s Memories Shared Today

When that sweatshirt (the one mentioned above) was found and my college daughter quickly declared it was hers, I could show her the picture of her dad wearing it almost 30 years prior. As my son was moving out and came across a little trophy, I could show him the picture that helped him claim that trophy 25 years ago.

krause-1 — *The “sweatshirt resurrected!”*

I also have recently captured memories as well.

krause-4 — *Sitting in the last row (who knew there was a row ZZ?) for the 2012 MLB All Star Game.*

Remember that 50^th Anniversary party that started it all? Over 100 friends and family came from all over the country for a surprise dinner to celebrate them. I made my in-laws a photo book to commemorate the weekend. (I’ve since made a photo book for almost every family vacation and holiday as well.) When my daughter graduated high school and wanted certain pictures for her page in the yearbook, I was able to find them easily. For Christmas gifts each year, I make calendars for my parents highlighting pictures of the grandkids, and they love them! It’s important to organize those pictures so you can find and relive those memories captured on film.

I’ve heard it said that a birth certificate proves you were born and a death certificate proves you died but a photograph proves you lived. So, no picture, no proof!

We also invite you to visit our sister blog The Photo Organizers for more tips and in-depth knowledge from some of the top photo organizing industry professionals. To find a photo organizer near you, visit the Association of Personal Photo Organizers.

My name is Lori Krause. I live in a suburb of Kansas City with my husband of 28 years and a recently adopted dog who keeps me on my toes. We have 2 amazing human kids: one working on becoming a certified cicerone (beer expert) and one in college studying sports marketing.

I’m a non-practicing registered nurse. I’ve been in some sort of nursing since 1981. I love nursing, but healthcare is changing. I also love taking and organizing pictures. I had no clue I could transition careers so easily! As a nurse, I looked at the whole patient and evaluated what I could do to help and care for the patient. As a Photo Life Manager and member of APPO, I evaluate all of the client’s needs and help them care for their photographs.

Sep 21 2016

Leaving Your Family Legacy

Every person has a story to tell and a family legacy to share. Marianne Behler of Lifetime Photo Solutions believes every person (children especially) should have a book to hold that tells how important they are, their history with pictures and stories of their life.

Family Legacy: Who Gets the Pictures? Who Tells the Stories?

Every person has a story to tell and a family legacy to share. Every person (children especially) should have a book to hold that tells how important they are, their history with pictures and stories of their life.

Have your heard the saying, “It’s never urgent until it’s too late?” I encourage people to take the steps needed to preserve their pictures and tell their stories before it’s too late. Our pictures, our story, impacts the lives of others: the people who care about us, our children, our family and future generations. There is a window of opportunity to get this done. This window is before we get ready to move into a retirement facility. Definitely before we start needing assistance from others.

I recently assisted two families in creating their family history books. Both almost missed that window of opportunity. One person developed Dementia during the process which led to Alzheimer’s. She started exhibiting signs of memory loss when we were working to identify the people and to record the stories of her life. The other, a gentleman who lived to see is book completed, died just three weeks later from an advanced stage of Parkinson’s.

Getting started means creating a plan to guide you through the process.

Start Now and Allow Time

A collection of pictures and stories that spans several generations will take time to assess and curate (organize and digitize). A collection may include both printed and digital photos, photo albums, framed photos, photo books, movies and more.

Create a Vision and a Plan

Envision completion. A Photo Organizer will assist you in all phases of planning and completing a Legacy photo book, a slide show, celebration poster boards and digital storage systems that will allow you to keep your memories while eliminating the clutter.

Involve Your Family

Who wants your photos? Many families decide to create a photo book with copies for each of their children and grandchildren as a gift to celebrate milestone events: weddings, anniversaries, retirement and/or significant birthdays.

Keep the Memories, Not the Clutter

A DVD can be created of your BEST photos. Celebration of life posters, canvas prints, and important photos [framed] can become your wall art for you to share and for everyone to see. Photos taken of your collections and significant treasured possessions can be incorporated.

Hire a Professional

A professional brings energy, is not overwhelmed, is objective and can assist you in making decisions about each picture, each piece of memorabilia and the telling of your story. Create a budget to complete your project. If you have a 50-year collection of photos and accompanying items, it will take time consisting of several stages of work for a photo organizer to complete your project. Find a photo organizer near you at APPO.org.

Would you like to tell your story and leave your legacy? #saveyourphotos Click To Tweet

Leaving A Family Legacy

After giving a presentation at a local retirement facility, a woman approached me saying that she wanted to have a legacy photo book completed of her most important pictures, stories and her family treasures. She was widowed, did not have children to leave her pictures and stories to, but wanted to complete it for herself and her family. We took pictures of her significant family treasures and featured both the pictures and stories in her book.

Here are two pages from her Family Legacy book:

Would you like to tell your story and leave your legacy for your children, grandchildren and future generations? Please consider getting started today. This could be the most important gift that you can give your family.

“Photos will only keep your memories alive when they have been arranged so that you can enjoy them whenever you like.” – Filing Fairies

Marianne Behler of Lifetime Photo Solutions resides in Jackson, Michigan. Lifetime Photo Solutions specializes in helping people with a lifetime of photos get organized, digitize their collection and create legacy photo books.

Aug 25 2016

Timeline of Our Family

This is a guest contribution by Rhoda Gordon of Sunflower Photo Solutions.

Are you searching for one more excuse to print out your photos? This is it! I have a great idea that my sweet husband gets all the credit for. When we got married, he suggested we take a family picture each year to hang in our home. This is what we have done for the last 26 years which have become a timeline of our family.

These pictures hang in our study about 6 inches below the ceiling and span all four walls. They march in progression from the first, which is our wedding photo, to the last, which was taken only a few weeks ago. We chose the study because, at the time, this was a room that would be used by all family members. Remember the days of one large, desktop computer? Well, our study still gets a lot of use.

These pictures not only tell the story of our family, but they also are an insight into how capturing images has changed over the years. The first ten years or so we had professional photos shot, then we began to shoot our own because taking quality photos became easier. Hmm, it was either because the digital cameras were introduced, or the fact that we no longer had squirming children. The only thing consistent about the images is the people in them, but I defined a collection by giving them the same look and feel with simple black framing and a consistent size.

It is a wonderful feeling to look back and see how our family has grown, to see the progression of the kids and how my husband and I have aged. Some of the images are posed but as we all have gotten older, more of them are casual and some downright silly. This reflects the personality of our family and how we live our life. This is the timeline of The Gordon Family and I am so happy my husband thought of it!

Rhoda Gordon is the founder of Sunflower Photo Solutions, a photo organizing, scanning, and preservation firm. Photography is in her blood. She comes from a long line of photo and photo equipment enthusiasts going back several generations. She has been organizing photos, creating slideshows and photo books most of her adult life. Now she helps others do the same. Her services include print and digital photo organization, image and document digitization, slideshow and photo book creation, photo restoration, and personal training in all of the aforementioned.

Her career began as an electrical engineer working for AT&T Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and more recently, Rhoda has been teaching at Brookdale Community College. She is a certified personal photo organizer and a member of APPO (Association of Personal Photo Organizers). Rhoda is dedicated to her craft and continually takes ongoing education to keep up with the latest technology. She was raised in Monmouth County, graduated from Rutger’s University and currently lives in Freehold, NJ.

Rhoda is a wife and mom of 3 beautiful children; one daughter in graduate school, another one in college, and a son in high school. She loves spending time with them, her wonderful husband and their basset hound, Rambo. She also has found the time to be a committed volunteer for CentraState Medical Center and its foundation since 1995.

Rhoda’s passion is helping others preserve their beautiful memories in a way that they can revisit them again and again. She believes that pictures tell the story of our lives, and that of our families.

Let her help you tell and preserve your story.

Aug 18 2016

Capturing The Stories to Go With The Photo

This is a guest contribution by Kathy Rogers of Baltimore Photo Solutions

Saving family photographs is why I became a photo organizer. But a big part of that is recording the stories that go along with the photos. Photos without context and identifiers lose a lot of their value.
Recently, we’ve been cleaning out my mother-in-law’s apartment. We came across a few more photos I hadn’t already claimed, and sadly, many of them were stuck together. We couldn’t tell if there was writing on the back identifying who was in the images, and no one was left who could tell us the stories of the photos. So into the trash they went. I’m grateful that my father-in-law was into geneaology and wrote down many of the family stories.
I’m still trying to capture the stories that go along with the photos from my side of the family. I’ve tried to do this a variety of ways. Photo books are great. Lots of room for narrative, and easy for anyone to flip through them. You can even make extra copies for siblings or cousins. I’ve also tried to capture my parents telling stories. Sometimes about a picture, like the image below.

JERsr4generations — Four generations. The child is my grandfather. c 1903

Just looking at that image, you might think it was a little girl. Actually, it was my grandfather with his great-grandmother, mother, and grandmother when he was a few years old. He was born in 1899. It’s important to capture the names to go along with the faces, even though we have family tree(s) and Bibles that record the generations. This not only told me the fact that little boys wore dresses back then, but also gives a glimpse into austere Quaker styles in turn of the century Philadelphia.

PhoneMic-1 — Can be purchased on line or at the big box stores.

When there’s a longer story to capture, I like to use the app Saving Memories Forever. I can organize my father’s stories, my mother’s stories, and also collect tales from my friend’s mom all in the same app. One thing I have noticed while interviewing older friends and family is that they aren’t comfortable being videoed. Their posture and storytelling can get stilted and unnatural. They also don’t know what to do when you put a fancy microphone lavaliere on them, or stick a smart phone mic in their face. However, they’re usually very comfortable talking on the phone. So for longer stories that don’t work as video, I just try to get their voice. And I use this handy tool:

This microphone isn’t professional sound quality, but that’s OK. It looks and feels like a handset, and I’ve found that people of a certain generation are most comfortable with this kind of setup. There’s a button on the grip to start and stop the mic, so you have to watch that, but otherwise it works like a charm. Plugs right in to the jack on my iPhone, and away we go. I pick the story prompt from Saving Memories Forever, or create my own topic, and the oral history is recorded and filed away.

I hope these tips are helpful to you as we celebrate Save Your Photos Month. Having a backup plan is important, but capturing the stories that go with the pictures is a crucial first step in saving your family’s photos and legacy.

My name is Kathy Rogers and I am a certified personal photo organizer. Because so much of my life is digital, I understand how overwhelming it can be to deal with the thousands of photos we have scattered around on memory cards, phones, old hard drives, you name it. There are great systems out there for organizing, and backing up, your digital pictures. They are simple to learn, and simple to maintain. It takes some time to get everything set up but I can show you how to do that in manageable chunks of time, or you can hire a professional photo organizer (like me!) to do it for you.

I have always loved photos and the stories behind them, and have turned this passion into a business. I started out making my own scrapbooks as a teenager but really got into it after my son was born. Friends saw what I’d done for him, and asked me to do the same for their children. Add in some elderly relatives who needed to stay connected and a business evolved.

As I’ve learned more about photography, photo organization and digital scrapbooking, I’ve been amazed by the treasure troves of pictures tucked in the back of closets. It saddens me when there’s no one left who can tell us the stories in the pictures, but with a little detective work it’s amazing what you can piece together. I get the most joy out of taking those scary boxes away and coming back with a neat, organized (and safely preserved) photo storage system along with a beautiful custom photo book of the best of the best, with copies to go to other family members.

Bringing order to the photo chaos is my specialty, and my pleasure. Email me today for a free assessment.

Aug 16 2016

The Simplest Ways to Make the Best Slideshows

This is a guest contribution by Andrea Sims of Your Story. Share It!

Remember the occasion of the family slideshow of the old days? Usually enjoyed a few weeks after a big vacation or event. The family would gather around, set-up the screen or hang a sheet and dim the lights. The projector would hum in the background as the photos went around with a “clickety-click.” Inevitably, the soothing ambiance would be disrupted by snoring, as Grandpa dozed off.

But, family slideshows don’t need to exist in the dim living rooms of yesteryear nor do they need to put family members to sleep. Slideshows are still an excellent way to celebrate milestone birthdays and anniversaries, graduations, the bride and groom, vacations or the-year-in-review. With these simple guidelines you’ll be able to plan slideshows that evoke emotion and fond memories.

Recently, my family returned from an annual trip to the Lake Region of Maine. I decided to celebrate our many Maine vacations with a slideshow. My husband grew up visiting his grandmother at the lake cabin, and now enjoys taking our family and making new memories. My Maine slideshow includes photos from many visits—including my husband as a child, our visits before we had kids and visits with our kids.

When getting started with a slideshow, ask yourself these simple questions. The answers will help you plan the best slideshows.

WHO IS VIEWING THE SLIDESHOW?

It’s important to consider the audience and environment for viewing when planning the length and number of photos to be included. Basically, the larger the audience, the shorter their attention span will be.

Social media audience à less than 1 minute, 15-20 photos
Captive, large audience during a presentation à 3-4 minutes, 40-50 photos
Small, personal audience at home à 5-6 minutes, 75-100 photos

My Maine Vacations slideshow is for home viewing by family and fits the last scenario.

In any case, it’s important to curate your photo collection carefully. Remember to include a variety of photos from a wide range of activities without being repetitive.

HOW IS THE STORY TOLD?

I recommend using a storyboard to plan the slide order. Photo order can be either:

Chronological
Logical sequence with thematic sections

For my Maine slideshow, I chose to use thematic sections. I’m often asked what my family does during our Maine vacations. While gathering photos, I found that our visits focus on three things—the deck, the dock and the family. First, the deck is where we enjoy sharing meals and playing games. Next, the dock is the hub of water activities including fishing, swimming and boating. Finally, the family is the focus as we relax, take walks and laugh together.

Be intentional in the structure of the slideshow and use the slide order to show connections and story development.

WHAT IS THE MOOD OF THE SLIDESHOW?

One of the best reasons to use a slideshow to showcase your photos is the ability to convey emotion with animation and music. Music is used to set the pace and mood. Plus, changes in music identify transitions. Graphic elements, fonts and color help to set the mood just as they do in print.

When telling the story of our Maine vacations, I included music and graphic elements to provide a summery, happy feel—reminiscent of visiting a summer camp as a kid.

Ready to visit Maine with us? Click here for a sample of my Maine slideshow to see how I considered the audience, structured the story and set the mood. This slideshow even passed the Grandpa test—he didn’t fall asleep!

Whether you want to celebrate a lifetime or events of the past year, slideshows make a great way to enjoy your photos. With a little bit of preplanning, making a memorable slideshow can be simple. There are many programs and apps to create your own, such as, iMovie (Mac), Animoto (Web), ProShow (PC or Mac), Lightroom (Mac/PC), Windows Movie Maker (PC), etc. Or, contact the Association of Personal Photo Organizers (APPO) to find a photo organizer to help you share your story with a slideshow.

Andrea Sims is a member of the Association of Personal Photo Organizers (APPO) and the owner of Your Story. Share It! She is passionate about celebrating memories with photos. After many years of scrapbooking as a hobby and volunteering with school yearbook staffs—first as a student and later as a parent—she decided to become a photo organizer. Andrea especially enjoys creating slideshows for events. Being a photo organizer gives her the opportunity to help other people enjoy their photos and share their stories.