Scrapbook Fever - A 21st Century Scrapbook Retailer

I told Shelly Izen, the owner of Scrapbook Fever in Salem, OR that I was going to blog about how smart she and her husband, Bud, are.

They are a scrapbook retailer who "gets it" when it comes to thinking outside the box and looking for opportunities outside the normal "make and take" or technique classes for their store.

Scrapbooking without photos is really just a paper craft. And, GREAT photos inspire us to scrap. I can't tell you how many "so-so" photos don't get scrapped at my house. It's only the great ones that make me feel like scrapping.

Could scrapbookers use digital photography tips? You bet they could! And Scrapbook Fever has responded to that need and is now offering digital photography classes in their store.

Read their class description - makes me want to drive to Salem:

Digital Photography Class 101 series with Canon Rep – Our fabulously successful Digital Photography 101 series is brought to you by Canon! This is a course for beginners who need some assistance in understanding their digital camera and its functions! If you take the majority of your pictures using the Auto function on your camera, this course is for you!

This is a series of four (4) two-hour classes designed to help you understand the functions on your digital camera, show you some cool Canon products to print your pictures on, and finish up completing a project using the pictures taken and printed during these classes! Everyone will complete a very cool 8x8 mini album (designed by us of course)

Now, if they added custom photo books and gifts (also a great series of classes to offer) with something like our PhotoBookBiz option, they will have propelled themselves completely into the 21st Century of Scrapbooking.

I applaud their willingness to offer a class like this and think they are very smart scrapbook retailers!

May is National Photo Month!

Imagine the world without photos. Our memories would be the only thing left from weddings, births, family reunions, school programs, etc. Photos help us remember the events - big and small - of our lives.

Show your photos some love this month! If you've been meaning to scan and share - do that this month! If you've been meaning to upload your photos from your camera - do that today! If you haven't gotten your photos into scrapbooks, photo albums or photobooks, now is a great time to work on those activities again. Here are some other suggestions:

• Offer to take a photo for someone so they can be in it.
• Print out those photos from your computer.
• Organize and label your negatives.
• Send slides off for scanning.
• take photos of ordinary, everyday activities - those are important, too!
• photograph your collections and hobbies
• photograph your kids' favorite toys

Photos bring our memories back to life! Celebrate them in May!

My Jill-e Bag

I got it! I finally GOT ONE! I saw Jill-e camera bags at PMA in 2008 and immediately fell in love. These are the "Coach purses" of camera bags and I've never seen anything like them before.

So, after begging my husband for a year to buy me one as a gift, I finally just went ahead and got one for myself after seeing them again at PMA 2009.

Meet my NEW CAMERA BAG! My Sony Alpha 100 is right at home in it. In fact, so is my extra lens and my Flip with room left over. It was much roomier than I thought and I could seriously also throw my wallet, keys and cell phone in it and call it a purse, too (it's cute enough to carry as one). As I add lenses, there is plenty of space in there to fit them.

The cool thing is that the dividers on the inside are held in by Velcro on the sides of the bag so you can totally reconfigure the inside of the bag to fit whatever you need to fit in it.

Someone asked me if the bag was good quality. Yes, it is! It's leather and really pretty heavy (note to you smaller peeps, you might find this bag too heavy to carry). There's nothing "cheap" looking about the bag and the lining is so cute - it's cream with big polka dots.

I've already had a couple of friends ask where I got the really cool camera bag. I was happy to toss my ugly black nylon one into the Goodwill pile last week. Wait, maybe I should get it out again so my husband will carry my camera once in a while. Nah, I'll just have to buy him a Jack bag...

PhotoBiz

Since many scrappers have now gone BEYOND the point and shoot digital camera and moved on to the DSLR's, I am seeing what seems to be an epidemic of photography business owners among scrapbookers. It reminds me a bit of the scrapbook industry 10 years ago - everyone who liked to scrap wanted to open a store.

I really kind of cringe a little when I see messages like I saw on a forum last week that said (and I'm paraphrasing), "Hey, my husband ordered me my first DSLR and I'm ready to open my photography business! Where would I take classes to learn how to use my camera?" YIKES! Those messages scare me. Just because you have a DSLR - even a killer one - doesn't mean you're ready to open a business. It's sort of like the woman who loves to cook and cooks well thinking that's all the skill she needs to run a restaurant. Not to mention you seriously need to be able to use more than your auto settings on your camera to take good photos. And, Photoshop can't perform miracles.

So, before you run off and start posing teens by dumpsters in alleys (seriously, what's up with that?), here are some things to consider:

• Do you have a business plan?
  
• How much will you charge for what kind of sessions?
• What's your specialty or niche
• Do you have the other equipment that other pros have? Lights? Backdrops? Lenses?
• Where will you consult with clients? Your home? Starbucks? Their home?
  
• Do you have a portfolio with a good variety of photos you have taken?
  
• Do you have a professional website that has REAL information on it? I hate websites full of pretty photos but not one indication of hours or package prices.
  
• Do you have a nice place to have prints made that DOESN'T have "-mart" in it's name?
• Do you have the correct business licenses? You need to be legal - collect taxes, etc.
  
• Can you deal with a bride who hates every photo you took of her big day? This isn't always a glamorous industry - sometimes people FREAK OUT at you because they were thinking "traditional" and you were thinking "edgy" and you can never recreate the day. For every happy client there will be 3 willing to string you up for being the worst photographer ever (in their minds). Can you take the criticism?
  
• Do you have the correct insurance? There is liability here that you may not think about - see the tip before this if you need an example. People love to sue!
• Do you have a contract to sign that is clear and legally binding/protecting?

Owning ANY business is more than just the fun, artistic, creative side you see. Behind that is hours of work and months or years of marketing. Those types of things are what I call the "un-fun" parts of being a business owner - but they are the MOST IMPORTANT parts that will make or break your business.

I haven't read this book, but I would suggest you get something like the Fab Job Guide to Opening your Own Photography Business for starters. It seems like it's very elementary and if you've never owned a business before, it's probably what you need.

New Year's Resolution: Scan, Scan and then Scan Some More!

Last week, I asked a question at a large consumer scrapbook board about slides. I asked how many people had them or were worried about them. The answers were surprisingly and collectively a big YAWN for the most part. Many people admitted that they or their parents HAD slides but most said they either would tackle the giant chore "someday" and "on their own" or that they just couldn't be bothered to worry about them right now.

I am in a panic over mine and I wish people understood that they should be too. They don't last forever. They lose their color, fade to white or fade to black. I've seen all three in the slides I have been scanning. I scanned the slide above just the other night. It's a picture of my husband (sitting) and his older brother who just passed away from ALS in September. It's probably from 1969. My husband has very few photos of himself as a child and this just makes me sick. Slides of my trip to Australia in 1985 have a dark cast to them and slides of our wedding in 1987 have lost their luster, too.

One of my deepest photo fears (the one that keeps me up at night) is that by the time scrapbookers and other family archivists decide to be worried about the 40 year old slides, they'll be unusable.

My New Year's Resolution is to scan everything I can get my hands on this year. Those images are precious and priceless, I need to preserve them!

Santa Photos: A Suggestion for Photographers

This is a shout-out to my photographer friends in the photo industry. I want to have a photo of my kids with Santa taken. This is probably the last year they will both believe and I want a really nice photo with a great Santa.

I'm not satisfied with the mall Santas, nor the quality of the photos I get there so I'm on the hunt for a great Santa at a local independent photo studio. I see the signs and ads all over for them. But, here's the problem, when I go to their websites to check out their Santas, I am not seeing what I need. Most of the sites don't even mention their Santa photos and I am even finding blogs linked off these sites that have nary a mention of their Santa photos. Why would you not do SOMETHING to let customers know what they're getting? Blogs are easy to update. Post me a photo and put my mind at ease about your Santa photos!

If I'm going to make an appointment, dress my boys up (no easy feat) and pay $50 for a sitting and photos, I want to know what I'm getting. I don't want to arrive at the studio to see what I call "Wino Claus" - some thin-haired hatless Santa in a festive shirt sitting on a metal chair covered with a Christmas-colored blanket. I want the full-on deal - bushy, curly beard, hair as white as snow, beautiful plush velvet suit on a jolly fat man sitting in a large throne-like chair. And, if you're offering that kind of quality - then show me!

I think Santa photos are a great way to drum up business during the holidays. But, hanging a sign outside your studio may not be enough. Many consumers are savvy enough to go looking for more information at your site before they decide to make an appointment. Make it easy for them to find the information they require. Honestly, if I can find a site with the correct information in the next day or two, that's who wins MY business.

Okay, I'll go back to the scrapbook world now.

Are you a Mamarazzi?

We went to the holiday concert for our elementary school last week. I actually DIDN'T take any cameras with me. After 7 years of concerts, I have found that A) the photos never turn out that great in the dark auditorium from 20 rows back and B) I never do anything with them anyway. So, I decided just to enjoy the concert.

Being camera free gave me the chance to view the "Mamarazzi". A "Mamarazzi" is a mother with a camera who is out to get the "Money Shot" - the one photo that makes people stop and gasp when they see it on a scrapbook page. The "Mamarazzi" will go to great lengths for that shot.

You could hardly see the concert for the glow of the cameras being held overhead to try to get a shot without the head of the person in front of them. One Mamarazzi crawled over 8 people from the center of a row (and these are not well-spaced rows - you literally have to crawl over people to get out) so she could stand in the aisle through half of the last song and take photos. Of course, that blocked the view of people behind her (and violated the fire code for the civic auditorium). When she was satisfied with her shots, instead of respectfully waiting until the last song was over, she crawled BACK over the top of people to get back to her seat. It was really obnoxiously rude.

I have pretty much stepped away from bordering on a Mamarazzi lately. I have come to realize that I don't need to take my camera to EVERY soccer game. I only took it to ONE this year - took a bunch of great shots and then spent the rest of the season enjoying the game. I left it home and enjoyed the concert, too. It's been kind of liberating. I have plenty of photos to scrapbook and I'm starting to realize I don't need to document every second of my kids' lives to be a good mother. I was nearly to the point where I was watching them grow up in a little window on my camera.

But, like the Mamarazzi, we are all in a quest for that PERFECT shot - the kid diving for the ball, splashing into a pool, doing the perfect leap, smiling the best smile. It's what drives us as scrapbookers at times. But sometimes, we need to remember we already have 300 shots of them dancing and it's time to get down to business and scrap the photos we already have and stop worrying about the photos we might be missing.

A great holiday photo project

This is a great (and easy) project for a gift. Frame a beautiful poem about FAMILY with photos of the family. It's really, really simple!

Just in case someone forces you to be in a photo...

If you're like me, you're guilty of never allowing anyone to take a photo of you unless you are looking up and they are standing at least 3 miles away from you.

I am doing better at it than I used to. I know it's important that I am in SOME of the family photos. I've taught Mark to be better at photographing me. He has a better eye than he used to.

Here are some great tips from PhotoJojo on looking good in photos - if you must be in them. Stand a little sideways and STRETCH THAT NECK like you're a giraffe!!!

Help a Photographer

As summer comes to a close and everyone is taking their last vacation, I see lots of photos being taken! Hopefully those photos will end up in a scrapbook somewhere for the family to enjoy!

A few weeks ago, I was in a tourist area and a group of motorcyclists were snapping photos. There were 2 couples together and three were posing while one of the women took a picture. So, I stopped and asked if I could take a photo of all of them together. They were thrilled!

But, that doesn't always work. I did that another time when I saw a family posing together and a mom taking a picture (the normal state of the universe at our house) and the mom said, "No way! I don't like my picture taken!" I had to laugh because that would have been my response!

If you're a scrapbooker, you understand how important it is to actually BE IN the photos at least once in a while. You don't want to be the "mystery woman" to future generations. So, help other other photographin' moms by taking a few seconds to stop and offer to take a photo for someone next time you're in a trip or in an area with a lot of tourists. It'll make YOU feel good for doing something nice and it will make THEM feel good that someone took the time to do that.

You've Got a Scrapbook in my Camera... No, you've got a Camera in my Scrapbook!

Remember this Reeses Peanut Butter Cup ad?





Check out the new Sony Cybershot - not only is it one COOL looking little camera (and I'm a Sony fan anyway so I assume I'll own one of these babies eventually - LOVE my Alpha 100).

Apparently, scrapbooking and photos have come together inside a trim digital camera (that comes in FUN colors). According to this press release: The camera also has a scrapbook function that automatically creates simulated scrapbook pages. Now you can share, print or save your scrapbooks unlike previous models.

That definitely has a high "cool factor" to it. I'm dreaming here, but wouldn't it be cool to have your photos print out completely scrapped?! What a timesaver! I'd have to find something else to feel guilty about - LOL!

Fire in the Sky!

My youngest son yelled, "HEY! LOOK AT THE SUNSET" and we all ran to the back door. The sky literally looked like it was on fire on Sunday night. It was so beautiful! It had been a nasty, grey day that had everyone grumping.

When I was little, my mom taught me the diddy, "Red sky at night, sailor's delight. Red sky at morning, sailor's take warning." Oddly, it's usually correct! It was a gorgeous summer day the next day.

On a slightly related note... I am working on a photo book for 2005. Those photos pre-date my lovely Sony Alpha 100 DSLR. They were all taken with my digital point and shoot. I am struggling to find photos that I don't hate. They are such poor shots compared to my DSLR. My biggest complaint was shutter time. I have the back half of my kids as they run out of the frame before the camera decided to actually take a photo.

I just took a TON of photos at our family reunion last week and everyone was dying to have them. You'd have thought I was a professional in their minds. But, I tell people that it's the camera, not me. I hate it when I can't take my DSLR with me!

A good camera makes all the difference...

A Little Photo Tip...

We just returned from our nephew's wedding in Idaho and of course, a ton of photos were taken. I took this one of three of my nieces. The first one was their pose, the second one, I requested that the tip their heads in slightly.

Whenever I take posed photos, I always say, "Heads together!" The result, at least to my eye, is always a more pleasant shot that makes the subjects look connected. My boys instantly tip their heads towards each other now when I pose them. But, being young boys, they usually start out with a head butt before they settle down and pose.

Next time you are taking family photos, have everyone tip their heads in slightly towards the middle of the group. It will make your photos look friendlier!

National Scrapbook Day and National Photo Month

National Scrapbook Day is this coming Saturday. Actually, though, it seems to be turning into National Scrapbook Month. Actually, I'd take that one step further and call it INTERNATIONAL Scrapbook Month. Scrapbooking is a hobby practiced around the world by women (and men) interested in preserving family photos and the stories behind them. It's interesting to me that May is also National Photo Month sponsored by the Photo Marketing Association International. It makes sense to me for retailers in the scrapbook industry to promote National Photo Month along with National Scrapbook Day (Month). Afterall, photos are the reason most of us scrap.

Along side the regular National Scrapbook Day activities, you could add classes on taking great photos, backing up digital photos, using photo editing software, making digital books, etc. You could also carry a line of camera bags from fun companies such as Jill-E. You could have a photo contest along with your layout contest. Partner with a local photographer and have a picture party in your store where scrappers can bring their kids for a 15-minute photo session with a professional photographer. There are all sorts of complimentary activities you could add that would make sense and stretch the celebration of all things scrapbooking through the entire month.

Contrast this with National Craft Month sponsored by The Craft and Hobby Association. It's in March and, frankly, I have never seen or heard of a scrapbook store who even cared let alone promoted it. Their national spokesperson is a crafter, not a scrapbooker. Most scrapbook businesses don't consider themselves a craft retailer anymore than a model train/hobby store does. We are a specialty hobby and the Craft Month promotions simply don't apply. I've always been sort of puzzled when March rolls around the the National Craft Month promotions from CHA start hitting my email box. It doesn't apply to us.

But, National Photo Month is something we can and should embrace. There is lots of cross-over into the scrapbook industry.

Later this week I will post some National Scrapbook Day sales that ScrapBiz members are having . Check back for some great deals!

Photo Altering - an historical look

I saw an article a few months ago about how parents are Photoshopping the heck out of their buck-toothed, wrong eye colored, freckled children to make them look perfect. Okay, removing a blemish or braces from a senior photo is fine, but changing eye color or giving your teen-age daughter a photographic breast augmentation or slimming a chunky child is a bit over-the-top in my opinion. But apparently it's happening - a lot. Your kids will grow up with a very false sense of their true look. That's just wrong. I always wonder what will happen when the dorky-looking couple from Extreme Makeover who fell in love have a baby. Do they KNOW the child will come out looking like they both did before they had half a million dollars in cosmetic surgery? Then what? They hated their look enough to subject themselves to the show. What will they do with their child?

Anyway, photo tampering is nothing new. However, I do find it more disturbing when the press tampers with photographic images than when someone tries to stretch themselves a bit to lose 5 pounds. Click HERE for a brief history in "Photoshopping" and air-brushing. It goes back nearly 150 years! Which means as soon as there were cameras, there were people trying to alter photos.

Cool DSLR Tip - DIY Flash Diffuser!!!

Check out this COOL TIP on fixing the problem of flash-overkill! It seems that if I need my flash for, say, an indoor close-up, that it's TOO MUCH flash and it completely takes all the fun details out of whatever I'm taking a photo of. But, if I try to take the photo without my flash, then it's too dark.

I am so going to dig around and find an old film cannister to make one of these little beauties. It's like flash-lite (not flashlight). This solves a common dilemma in a cheap and handy way. I love tips like this!!!!

From the Photo Industry

A friend gave me a subscription to Popular Photography magazine. I'll admit, it never occured to me to ever read a photography magazine. I, too, have been guilty of not completely understanding how integrated photography is in our scrapbook universe. I'm still not anywhere near the level of a true photography buff (although my friend told me when she went to pick up the photos I took at her daughter's wedding at Costco that they had written "Copyright?" across her envelope and asked her if she had the right to print the photos!). But, I found some interesting stuff in the magazine. There were several How-To articles about cleaning up your photos in PhotoShop and staging better photos, too.

Here are just a few tidbits I discovered:

• Put your scrapbook pages on a cake! What a fun thing to have a cake with a scrapbook page tribute on it!
• Fun with your digital photos - make fun goodies with your photos
• Shuttermom - sort of the photo industry version of ScrapBiz. Learn how to set up a home-based photography business
• Mpix - print your best photos on professional papers. You can even have them retouched professionally.

If you're really interested in taking better photos or have discovered, through scrapbooking, that you really LIKE taking photos, pick up a copy of a photo magazine or thumb through one at the local library. It's not all about the professional photographer, it's about people like us just trying to take better photos!

Easter Photo Tips

Easter comes really early this year! It's a great time to take photos! I love SPRING!

Don't forget:

• Photos while dyeing eggs
• photos of your girls picking out Easter dresses
• photos of your family in their Easter finery
• photos of your Easter dinner
• photos of the egg hunt
• with the Easter Bunny
• photos of the Easter Baskets
• your kids with their Easter Baskets
• the beautiful flowers of Spring

The Easter Bunny comes to our house on Saturday morning so as to not interfere with Easter Sunday and the true reason we celebrate Easter. I also don't have to drag the boys away from their Easter goodies and off to church. They can dig through the candy and small gifts all day on Saturday. The Easter Bunny usually brings Legos. We'll see if that tradition continues. I think I'll get one more year of EB coming and then the jig will be up.

Hidden Pictures - Hidden Profits

So, my last post wasn't so popular - LOL! So, let me add to it and further clarify as to why photos must be put in the center of our universe. Between my folks and I, we have about 3000 slides. I can't scrap a slide - it would look stupid. But, since I was born in the day when slides were cheaper than photos, I have three full carousels of 80 slides each of me from birth to around age 12. The number of photos I have from that same time period are less than about half that amount. My dad was a slide man. Every photo from my wedding 20 years ago is in a little plastic box inside a little white cardboard frame as is my husband's 2 year mission for the LDS church to Denmark and my once-in-a-lifetime 2 month trip to Australia in college. These images are only viewable when I can borrow my dad's Kodak slide projector. And, that thing is vintage. Replacement bulbs for it are running over $100 on eBay because they don't make them anymore. What happens when we can't get anymore bulbs???

I investigated slide scanning this weekend as I stated in my previous entry. It would cost about 50 cents PER SLIDE and I would have to box them up and send them off. Some companies then send them on to Costa Rica or even India without really telling me. I'm afraid to send them through the USPS, having them land in the Costa Rican mail service is unthinkable - even though these companies claim they have never lost anything. It would be my luck to be the first.

I can scan them myself, I have a FANTASTIC Epson scanner. But I did three boxes of them earlier this year and found loading 4 slides at a time into the slide converter was too time consuming. And, I have yet to see a batch scanner where I can load a bunch in that has a good review for a home-based model. The commercial models have much higher ratings. But, I'm not likely to invest that much.

Of course I'm not having every slide scanned, but let's say I had 2000 of them scanned at 50 cents each. That's $1000. Now, let's say my LSS sent me an email that said, "Hey, we now offer slide scanning for .49 each! Bring your slides to a crop and we'll scan them while you crop!" I'd be all over that. It's not hard to load my slide boxes into my bag and take them with me.

Okay, so, over the course of a year, I bring in a box or two at a time and eventually get the 2000 I wanted scanned at my LSS. The LSS just made $1000 off of me. That's quite a bit of money. So, now I have 2000 photos that I am excited to have my hands on. What, as a scrapper, would be my next step.... thinking... thinking... thinking.... yup, I'm going to want to SCRAP those photos. So, my LSS not only helped me with a problem but they helped to create a new revenue stream for themselves. I now have a lot more photos to work my way through and I'm going to need the products to make the pages.

I have yet to talk to anyone in the baby boomer generation who doesn't moan when you mention slides. We all have them. I looked at my three carousels full of my birth-12 ones last week and wanted to cry. Many are washed out to almost nothing while others have gone almost completely black. At this point, I'm getting desperate to do something with them before they are lost. I could wander around looking for a camera shop or local service to scan them. But, I would feel more "at home" at my LSS since they "get" why those are important to me.

Helping consumers tap into those hidden pictures will open up more opportunities for retailers in our industry. This is just one of the reasons why I say we need to pay attention to the photos first. What the consumer does with those new-found images is up to them. That's where our opportunity to grow begins. They can be as creative as they want (and that's what we want). They can print them out and scrap traditionally or they can go digital. But having those photos out of the little cardboard sleeves and into the hands of scrappers is what I'm talking about when I say that we need to focus on the photos. We want customers to have photos because they won't scrap without them. So, we, as an industry, should devote more time looking for ways to help them get more of their images into a scrappable format and spend less time quibbling over the other stuff. The other stuff will follow if we do our jobs and show consumers how fun it can be to do something other than just slip those photos into a plastic sleeve.

Taking Great Christmas Photos

My thanks to Jim for sending me these great tips! I told him he needed to teach me how to use my Sony A100 DSLR and the result has been these great sites with tips. Here are some ideas on how to take GREAT photographs this holiday season: LINK.

I'm going to go round up a star filter! I haven't yet ventured into filter-land. I just got a new lens - you know the one that's as long as your arm and someone always comments on - "Wow, that's ONE BIG LENS" - I call it "Lens Envy". I've suffered from it for some time myself until Mark bought me one for an early Birthday gift. I LOVE it! Now I'll have to get a filter or two to play with.