It was going to be simply spectacular.
I started working on my photo album yesterday. For a full 8 hours – with only the occasional break for food, petting the cat, and other business – I lay on the couch and started electronically sifting through the over 3000 photos Mom and I collectively took on our Centennial Cruise.
At lunch – a hot dog and hamburger Rob rebelliously grilled up for us on our BBQ (we’ve had rain so the BBQ should be covered and retired for the season by now) – Rob started questioning me about my plans for The Album.
As a gift, I recently tried out the newest wave of memory-keeping. I put together one of those Photo Books by Kodak Gallery. It was fun, easy, and looked very professional when it was delivered to my door in 3-5 business days. I was so excited by how spiffy it looked, I was certain that was the answer for capturing the literally thousands of memories from our hopscotch across the Mediterranean.
Knowing I needed as much maximum page length as possible, I eventually elected to use Costco’s Photo Book version instead. It was going to cost more, yes, but their software seemed to have lots more options and flexibility – and 20 more available pages.
Long after I should have started dinner, I previewed my work so far. I had completed 14 of my allotted 100 pages and I wasn’t even out of Venice yet. I really liked four of the pages. The rest were concessions. Concessions to the software. I couldn’t group the photos like I really wanted to and have them properly oriented landscape or portrait. They were cropped and resized in a way that robbed them of some of their beauty and perspective. Yes, the black background and white text looked very sharp, but the memories felt very cramped and dare I say, boring.
I was reluctantly coming to the conclusion that I might have to do my album the old-fashioned way, with processed photos and glue stick and a spare bedroom dedicated to the project for an entire month at least. I asked Rob to preview my 14 pages. His reaction was wisely neutral. The deal was sealed when I inadvertently discovered a warning not to cut-and-paste text from other applications since even though it would look OK on the screen, it wouldn’t print correctly. The FAQs particularly warned not to cut and paste dashes, apostrophes, and ellipses. I plan to include excerpts of my blog postings in my album. Dashes, apostrophes…and especially ellipses…are my very best friends. I suddenly envisioned having to retype and edit blog entries to make them fit into the confines of My Publisher. This was more acid-producing than the thought of getting out my glue stick.
So, a just-before-closing trip to Estrogenland (Joann Fabrics) yielded a photo album and 8 packs of expanded pages – with room for more! Today’s couch surfing will be spent cropping and color-fixing my photos just how I want them, irregardless of any software’s creativity-robbing dictates. My new self-imposed due date is Christmas.
And as a bonus, I think I’ll end up with a link I can share should anyone be interested in seeing photos beyond what’s been posted here already.
The cat has arrived. Time to start cropping.
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