Archive for the ‘Organization’ Category

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Love to write? Want to write? Are you a scrapbooker wanting to journal more?

I have to say once again that THIS SOFTWARE ROCKS! The more I use it, the more I rely on it and adore it. And the customer service is wonderful!

I’ve received a few emails asking me what software I use for my writing, so I decided I’d just ask for a small graphic I could put up. I use this software to track oodles of things I write about, research and just things I want to remember.

He offers a 45 day free trial of it if you want to see if it will work for you. I downloaded a whole heap of writing software trials awhile back, and I’ve tried Word and Open Office as well. This software, though, by far works the best for me for organizing the constant stream of ideas and thoughts that ping around in my head.

Disclaimer: I’m just a customer, and receive nothing special for posting this.

2.

The other graphic over there is for the next scrapbooking class I’m taking in September – which goes right along with the software. I’m reading the book the class grew out of: Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Rosenthal. I’m up to E. And already I’m filling in the pre-class work and writing up a storm in The Journal.  All I can say is that it’s transforming the way I think about scrapbooking – letting go of pre-conceived notions I didn’t realize I still held onto and sliding into what I think will become a good match for my life and the way the thoughts zing through my head.

Disclaimer: I won a free spot in the class from Cathy, but I’m not obligated to do a thing to promote it.

When I was a kid, I loved listening to the grownups talk.  I’d sit and listen and suddenly find the conversation had taken so many twists and turns and then I’d wonder how they got to the new point in their conversation when the original topic was vastly different. I’d then go back through the conversation in my mind and make those connections. Once I had gone all the way back to the original topic, I’d tune back into their conversation and start the process all over again.  Tracking backward along the rabbit trails the conversation took fascinated me – and seeing how people make connections now still fascinates me.  We all think so very differently and Communication and Inspiration skip hand in hand – inviting us along – down one rabbit trail after another.

I think that’s one reason I really enjoy listening to the Paperclipping Round Table podcast.  Lots of rabbit trails, inspiration and thought provoking topics (at least for scrapbookers – of any type). This week during their discussion on Chronological Scrapbooking, I realized my concept of that focused on the organization.  Never in my wildest dreams did I think that ANYONE actually scrapped the pages in order!  You know, start Jan 1 of a year and crunch your way through your photos, creating layout after layout in order until Dec 31.  And someone on there (Stacey J?) did it for NINE YEARS.  Wow.  No way could I even start to think that way, let alone scrap that way.

That and other discussions got me thinking about how I’ve wrestled with recording and scrapbooking life.  How do you live your life and record it as well?  My answer is to have many approaches.  In a way, like my photos, I have to first collect raw data – my written and physical (ephemera) RAW files in a way.

I write a lot – always scribbling down something either with a pencil (.05mm lead, thank you) or typing a note into my computer journal (using David RM’s The Journal software).   And of course, I write here on my blog. These three spots work for me.

Well – there is a fourth spot – I take photos as a visual journal. On an email list I’m on someone mentioned how sad to watch life through the viewfinder. Yet I see it differently. Much of the time I focus better looking through the viewfinder – focusing what I take in – cutting out the extra. That click of releasing the shutter cements the scene and moment in my mind. Clicker training works incredibly well with animals because clicks register deep in the brain.  Maybe that’s what photography does for me – that click tells my brain to remember the moment and set it apart from other moments.  It works well for me.

From that raw data – photo and words – I scrap.  I create.  Pulling a past moment together becomes easier with my notes and photos.  I can almost time travel right back to that moment.

Yet I crave the linear framework that time creates – and I definitely prefer to organize chronologically. My layouts have a chronological home to go to when finished.  In the six years I’ve scrapbooked, I find I don’t mind my first layouts next to a current one next to a printout of blog posts.  In fact, I’ve disassembled all of my old albums to get everything together in a neat set.

Maybe scrapbooking is really just a collection of rabbit trails of thoughts and events along our journey through this life.

A mini-book disassembled to include in my regular scrapbook album

Pages from an 8x8 Album now in my Childhood Album that's divided by Decades

Basically the past decade's album is divided by Years

I like this vacation album too much to disassemble, but will reprint layouts for the yearly albums.

Vacations are tough to scrap for many reasons: 500+ photos a day, new things to see and do regularly, a different routine, days so busy they leave you exhausted, and scrapping all of it seems as large of a prospect as the vacation itself.  In the end, many of us have the best of intentions, but the end product may fall short of our original ideas.  I don’t know if I can do any better this year than I have before, but I’m already setting the stage.

In recent years we’ve vacationed on the shores of Hebgen Lake near West Yellowstone at a delightful RV and Marina Resort.  We have plans to do so again this year and since our house sitter has again agreed to house sit, I can share a bit more of what all I’m planning.

Vacations really start when you begin to prepare.   And a part of that preparation is to plan out how to record it all. After watching Ali Edwards A Week in the Life I found myself really inspired me to take this type of approach to our vacation. Prep work is crucial. I actually have two ideas and am going to attempt them both.  I want to include 8.5×11 pages for my 2010 album, but I also want to create a unique mini-album. More on the mini-album later (waiting for items to arrive in the mail – it’s a digital hybrid idea).

For my 8.5×11 pages, I gathered together the templates included in Cathy Zielski’s Design Your Life class I took earlier this year over at Big Picture Scrapbooking. Next, I pulled together the ones that spoke to me – and reworked any square ones to fit the letter sized format.  Many of these are available for purchase over at Designer Digitals.

And, since we’ve been to Yellowstone before and love getting to know the Park more intimately with each visit (as well as the West Yellowstone/Hebgen Lake area), we have a color palette already. I spent a bit of time pulling colors from various photos and came up with this which will help me select kits to use and jump start some elements I’ll make myself.You could do the same thing on Flickr to pull colors from any location you plan to go (checking out spots to take photos as well).

Next step: create some elements and choose kits.

The more projects I have on my plate, the more I realize how crucial organization and looking ahead become – as well as working to move each project forward even a half step keeps everything on track.  And I’ve taken a couple more steps to getting my Nature Journal Albums going. I have many pages to assemble still from this spring, but creating a location for these layouts to land in has to come first.

Scrapbook organization is highly personal and what works for one person may not work for another.  So, when deciding where to put a layout, it has to come down to how you use them. Normally I keep all my layouts in chronological order.  I keep my photos that way and along with my morning journaling and notes I keep in The Journal software, it’s the logical way for me to work.  But, because I create mainly digital layouts, I can put multiple copies in multiple albums.

Organization that works stems from knowing how you will use your albums.  I have my nature journal pages entered in our yearly albums, but I want to use them also as a comparison and reference.   So, to that end, I ordered a couple of brown 8.5×11 American Crafts albums that line up neatly next to the red ones I use as yearly albums.  The Nature Journal Albums need dividing by the month.  And I finally got a start on the monthly divider pages – starting many ideas and finally settling on a few digital scrapbooking products: Lisa Carter’s Framed in Foliage (not currently available – but I’ll link/post about it if I can find out where it is available) and Meryl Bartho’s Defining Layers.

Next step – double check that I have all the previous layouts I’ve completed uploaded and ready to have printed (again) at Scrapbook Pictures.  Most of them are already uploaded and just needed to be shifted back to the ‘to print’ album there.    Today’s step is done for the Nature Journal Album.

Planning ahead. It’s a small thing that reaps enormous rewards. It provides the framework for creativity to flourish.  The idea of creating a digital Nature Journal has slowly taken shape. To that end, I’ve decided to order not only more 8.5 x 11 Albums, but also order extra prints of nature pages done in the past as well as duplicate copies of new ones. I want them in both my yearly albums and in their own nature albums sorted not by year, but by day of the year only.

And, for April this year, I’m planning ahead to have a format to quickly create pages related to Watching for Spring. I’m limiting myself to one digital page kit (wish this one had a value collection, but limiting myself, or forcing myself to add a few elements like the dotted rectangle I created, is ok), two fonts, two pages for each layout – one with photos in a grid determined by the photos themselves and the other page for text.

Watch for more – I’ll post as I get pages completed.

I spent about an hour or more organizing heritage scrapbook pages and sorted out the system that I plan to use.  Basically, I’m sorting by generation, starting a ‘new’ generation by when the parents married.   I came to this decision when sorting out my husband’s and my childhood photos.  Our childhood album starts with this layout (created with Elizabeth Weaver’s digital kit):

I carry this throughout my albums.  This morning I dug out the folder tab punch I bought, punched out some tabs and stapled three at the top of page protectors (digital hybrid scrapping again). These three main sections are:  Grands, G. Grands, G.G. Grands. Then in each section along the side, I put the family surnames. The album for my parents will mix with our childhood and get included in our own album from when we were married.

The next step I’ll do at some point, hopefully this week, is to put  a chart of who is in that generation and how they’re related.  Maybe a short bio of each person.

There are a million ways to organize your scrapbooking – many people do an album per family member, but that to me would be difficult simply because nobody exists alone.  Your story is tied to others.  My family has a generation of cousins that all grew up together, so naturally all the photos from this time contain multiple families.  The thing in common was the time that generation spent together.

Working it by generation and time (usually decade or year), things seem to find a place easily and no layout is at a a loss for a spot in an album.    Just one way to tackle it.

It seems that template got me thinking much more about doing a better job of organizing this website.  Funny how doing one thing leads to the next – must be that Flylady Kitchen Sink idea.  Who knew my template was my kitchen sink online?  The platform I’ve used worked well, but things feel cluttered – not unlike living in a house for 15 years and slowly accumulating too much stuff.  It’s time to bring in a few moving boxes, a dumpster and build an addition. 

If you click on PHOTOGRAPHY up there in the top bar, you should have (if I did it right) a new window open up with the photography section of the site.  It’s going to take a bit to shift things over, but I’ve made a start. 

THIS space will become my Mountain Life Blog – pretty much a jumble of all those other things in my life.  I think all of this will allow me to better focus what I’m doing with my business and not clutter that up with a recipe, or dog story, or whatever odd things come up. 

I’ve also updated the About Janet page.  I need to start writing more in my own voice to better reflect who I am.  Watch out – time to live a bit more deliberately – life is good and it’s getting better all the time!

I’ve been doing a LOT of work on my photo organization since my last post – mainly because my camera’s shutter went out and I got the dreaded Err99 – code for “something went wrong.”  Off to the Canon Repair Center it went and I hope to hear from them sometime today.  As nice as it would be to upgrade to the 7D, that’s not in the works right now, so I’m hoping the repairs will come in at a decent price.

But I digress…back to how I organize and get my photos ready to use.

What works for me may or may not work for you – and that’s how it is with so much with photography – one person’s path to where they are probably really won’t fully work for someone else, but then again, parts of it might be a wonderful solution.  As you may know, I’m against specializing – life is too big for me to specialize too much, though my focus for awhile might be on one thing or another, I just flat out like making images.  I take them for a variety of purposes – for stock, for someone’s portraits, for sketching reference photos, for scrapbooking, to tell a story, to create a series, just a lot of reasons.  That means my workflow can be a bit complex at times.

But for cataloging and copyright purposes, I have a spiral bound notebook that I’ve vertical lines on to create checkboxes.  Here’s basically what it looks like:

And I just start filling it out – each of the smaller boxes gets a date in it of when I completed that part of it – or a checkmark if that task was done at some point before I started this.

I could do this part online, but I find having that spiral notebook to hold in my hand and sitting on the desk staring at me in the face helps to keep me on task and not get lost on where I last left off.   Once these things are done, then I feel free to jump to the processing workflow.

But I also have a file on the computer now (using DavidRM’s software The Journal) that I enter in other data that must be tracked and kept organized for stock purposes and tracking the uses for copyright protection (once they’re registered, you have a ton more protection, but if you have a track record of each photo, all the better if when you run into a copyright infringement case).  I have this on the computer because I’ll keep going back and adding in how I use various photos – even for a scrapbook page.

Here’s a look at a section of my image tracking file:

Looking at this, I see I need to add in here a column for model/property releases I have on file.

Much of what I do is probably overkill for most folks, but if you’re even considering doing ‘something more’ with your photography, starting out with good records will save you a ton of time.  When I get quiet here, chances are I’m buried deep in past images working frantically to catch up on the behind-the-scenes organization.

Photo organization can be rough and with all I do with my photos it’s crucial.  Every photographer comes up with their own system, and mine developed over time.  Since I get asked this fairly often, I’ll start sharing more on how I have it working for me. Feel free to borrow what ideas work for you.

When downloading files, I name a folder for the date.   I may not download each day and don’t worry about that.  The file folder heirarchy on my external hard drive looks like this:

• Raw Files
  • Year
    • Month
      • Date

The next step is to rename the files.  In Adobe Bridge (I use PS CS3), I select all the photos and use the Batch Rename function under Tools.  Here’s a screenshot of the pop up box you get (I just selected one file from 2006):

Under the Text, I add in J to denote that I took  the photo.  And I preserve the last 4 digits by typing in the last 4 digits in the file name from the first photo in the batch.  The renamed file lets me easily find and track images as well as giving each a unique name needed to register the copyright.  It’s the first and probably the most important step in keeping track of all the photos and how they’ve been used.

This morning, though, I’m working on another part of the tracking process.  I used to keep this on paper in a 3 ring binder, but now want to transfer that information to The Journal software.  I’ve created a category for each year and tables with four columns – one for each month, but that may not really be needed – one table would work fine, but I like to break it into smaller chunks so I can feel ‘done’ with each month.

• Folder Date (One folder for each day I download)
• Subjects (for easy searches)
• Image Used (for copyright tracking)
• Where/When/How (for copyright tracking)

Once each year is done, I’ll print it out as a hard copy (in my opinion) offers the best assurance of archiving data.

More on the software I mentioned:  I’ve been using DavidRM’s The Journal software for over a year now to help me stay organized.  But with all the record keeping and writing I do, version 4 slowed me down as I bumped into the size wall of 2 GB.  I emailed David about the problems I saw and received a response in less than 20 minutes.   After walking me through a couple of possible fixes, he had me upgrade to version 5 which got me going again as it can handle over 200 GB in the database.   All I can say is WOW!

I was thrilled before to find a solution for my writing and records, but I now I absolutely adore all the additions and changes he did for Version 5.  You can organize, search, and write to your heart’s content knowing it’s all contained on your computer (you can even password protect it).  I know I haven’t even scratched the surface, I find myself breathing easier and relaxing knowing that now I’ve got room to get everything in one place – to print out what I want as hard copies, to act as a second brain for me.  It’s this writer/photographer/organizational nut’s dream!

If you want to record memories, do research, or just keep an extensive journal, give it a try – I’ve tried other software with lots of disappointment and regrets, but this one has me flying.

Disclaimer – No, nothing free from David, just the same great service he gives to all for an awesome product!

Have a great day all!

To help me reach my goals this year, I plan to spend the last week of each month going through my accomplishments of the past 3 weeks.  You see, normally I beat myself up for not sticking to resolutions or finishing as much as I thought I could at the beginning of the month.  Then discouragement sets in.  (Why do the negative thoughts come so easily?) The only way to change this pattern is to set a new one in its place.

This is where the little journal where I jot down what I do each day and my scrap daily project comes in handy.   It  gives honor and validity to what I do.  All those small steps taken add up to more than I realize and looking back on them builds me up.  Writing it down also works to keep me tuned in to how I choose to spend the hours of each day.

I also look ahead.  Where do I want to be in various projects by the end of February?  What steps do I need to take to get there?  By the end of this week, I should have a better idea.   Plus, I have this whole week to hunker down and crunch out work to add to the list of January’s accomplishments.  How wonderful!

In doing this, I find myself jazzed about this week – this month and next – and 2010.  It seems like 2010 may look much like 1988 – a year when so many folks found huge shifts happening in their lives.  I’m ready for that shift – for the next step.  How about you?