Designer Showcase: Using Less Than Perfect Photos

Happy Wednesday! Pam again sharing this weeks theme of using those bad quality photos or even ones that are less perfect than what you what normally use. I struggle big time with this. After I take a photo that is blurry I want to delete it right away. I am starting to keep some of them because I love how they look and hope to scrap them in the near future. This is hard for my because I am a perfectionist. You too should be keeping those less than perfect photos and scrapping them. I am going to share some ideas on how to scrap those photos!

First up is my layout, I thought I would share it because I just talked about my issues with using less than perfect photos. This layout shares some slightly blurry photos. We took these on a field trip and when I viewed them at home I realized they were really dark. I went to lighten them and I lost a lot of resolution (and it blurred a bit too).  I went with a sort of throw together kind of page with random stuff put everywhere on page (whimsical look) that I didn't plan out to do with some blurry star paper on the top to match. I love how this turned out.
BRIGHT IDEA #1: If you have blurry overexposed photos go with a whimsical feel to your page and it will look like it fits right in!

Vintage photos can be of poor quality just because they are so old. You need to scrap these anyways, just like Sheila did!! Check out how she made this work perfectly with those papers and embellishments which fit the theme so well.
BRIGHT IDEA #2: Use vintage products for your vintage photos and it will look amazing. Those photos will look like they were made for those papers!

Tanya created our next page. As you can see her page featured underexposed photos. This is what Tanya had to say about it, "The terrible pic was taken on our 7th Anniversary, in a hotel room mirror.  We had spent the weekend at my 20th HS reunion, and were rushing to get packed up and head to the airport.  It was the only picture we had from that day, and it was definitely terrible! :)  I used muted tones and raw chipboard, I thought it went with the odd coloring in how it came out."
BRIGHT IDEAS #3: If you have only one photo from a special event scrap it and tell the story.  Match the tones of the photo to the elements an you have a page that works and looks great!

Our last layout is by Sharon! She actually extracted her photo from the background and attached it directly to her page. Check out how great this looks because she sat the photo on the page like it was meant to be there. Really like this idea!
BRIGHT IDEA #4: If you photo background is so distracting, cut out your subject and it add it to a page where it meant like it was supposed to be, like sitting on books!

Have a great day and find sometime to scrap today!!

VISIT THE CONTRIBUTOR'S BLOGS/GALLERIES
Cathy Dippolito
Dolores Schaeffer
Cindy deRosier
Marlene Murphy
Lesley Walker
Gael Spence
Sarah Routledge
Sharon Fritchman
Tanya Ham
Sheila Burns
Pam Callaghan