Scrapbooking in China

At the moment I am in Luoyang City, China, visiting my son, who teaches English at a university here. I'm having a marvelous trip -- this country is really unbelievable. Opulence and poverty side by side with poverty, of course, winning out in sheer numbers. If you are interested in seeing some of my photos and reading a bit of my travels here, please visit my personal blog; www.debztalkin.blogspot.com.

As far as I can tell, no one here has heard about traditional scrapbooking, let alone digital, so it's really hard to explain to people what I do for a living! I been a special guest in my son's classroom on several occasions and we have been showing photos of him as a little boy, places of interest in America, and even one or two of my digital scrapbook pages. They especially love this one of my two cats.

In spite of the title of this posting, I'm not actually doing any scrapbooking here in China. I didn't want to bring my laptop so I don't have my Photoshop program. I am going to go home with TONS of photos, however! If I scrapbooked my China photos full-time 'til the end of the year I wouldn't be able to do them all, so I'm going to have to be very picky about which pictures to use. My son and I are both shutterbugs so, between the two of us, we will have literally thousands of photos!

I can't wait to get started on a travel album but will need lots of tips and ideas. If any of you have done travel pages I'd love to see them. Please leave a comment and a url where I can view them. THX!!!

Creating Digital Wedding Albums for Others

I'm currently working on a digital wedding album for one of my customers. This is a photo of the bride in her exquisite gown, veil, and holding a bouquet of her favorite flowers, in a beautiful, natural setting, on one of the most important days of her life.

When I create layouts using very formal photos like these I like to keep the pages very simple. The first thing I want a viewer's eye drawn to is the all-important subject of the photo, in this case the bride. To do that I use a bold, textured background that appears striking only in contrast, and as a complement, to the photo. I like a double- or triple-matte with colors that bring out the subject of the photo. A simple embossed embellishment (the bouquet of flowers) and perhaps a word or two that expresses the emotion of the photo, and that's it. In my mind nothing more is needed.

The subject of the photo speaks for herself.

Simply beautiful.