Picture Perfect? Not Really...But That's OK!

People may have varying opinions on what I'm about to share, and that's okay. To each their own. So here's the question.

"Do you scrapbook photos that are unclear, blurry, grainy, half/overexposed (from back when you actually developed film), etc?"

I say yes....to an extent. I personally don't want a whole album full of pictures you can't really enjoy, but sometimes, those blurry, tip-of-the-finger-covering-up-half-the-frame photos are the ONLY ones you have!

Now this isn't such a problem nowadays. You take a quick look to see if the photo turned out on your phone or digital camera and retake a quick one if needed. But for those old photos in a box in the attic, or in my case, hastily glued on a paper page a dozen or so years ago, you need to make a decision about how and IF you'll used them.

Here's a two-page spread I had scrapbooked on paper, with less-than-stellar photos---but they are the only ones, AND (most importantly) they tell a story all their own.

My wife wrote a couple of cookbooks in the early 2000s, and did the whole local news and talkshow circuit promoting them. She'd take her digital camera with her to the set and snap a couple of pictures (as seen in the page above). And when she would appear on television, her cute little grandparents would watch and then take pictures of her while she was on TV. How freaking cute is that! (see page below)

So this is what prompted this whole blog post today. Are they professional quality photos? No. Do they tell a story and therefore worth preserving? I say, whole-heartedly, YES!

So here's how I took these two pages and made them into a PL app scrapbook page, because let's face it, the paper pages, even have remained in this partially finished, no-journaling added state for far to long! :)

I wanted a template with fairly large card slots, so I could feature the photos I have prominently. So I opted for the Design Q Template.

I placed the photos from the pages into the card slots, and found that I had two square slots and the top 4x6 slot available for filler/journaling cards.

I decided that I really like the "Every Picture Tells a Story" saying that was on one of the cards in the Capture Life Themed Cards kit---but I wanted to save that last 4x6 card slot for my journaling.

So I put the card in, and then tapped and dragged (drug?) it to one of the square slots. 

But it was now sideways. I quickly rotated it using the rotation button. 

Then I added another card from the same kit into the other square slot (using the square card options from that set), added a journaling card, and wrote my memories down! Then I changed the background color on the page to match the journaling cards, and called it a day! :)

Let me know in the comments how you incorporate less-than-perfect photos into you pages!

I added journaling to the camera card first, then used a FFT box to add the heart (from the UniChar keyboard).