Among the many book ideas that we suggest on our site, one of our favorites is the Kid’s Art Gallery idea. It’s really hard to part with the many pieces of artwork that are generated both at school and at home, but it’s also really hard to find space to display or store them all. A photo book offers an excellent solution for this dilemma.

Artwork by Nathan McQuillan

We interviewed Matt McQuillan, who put his son Nathan’s artwork into a portfolio book. (We were so tickled with Nathan’s work that you might have noticed it sprinkled throughout the site.) Here’s what Matt had to say about his project:

Q: What was your inspiration for making the book?

A: Nathan has always been interested in displaying his artwork for everyone to enjoy. When I found the portfolio book idea at Inkubook, the idea just made sense for his art. I thought it would be fun to put together his portfolio and wait to surprise him as he has always tried to make his own books with staples and tape.

Q: Is Nathan a prolific artist? Are most of his works done at school or at home?

A: Nathan has been artistic since he was very little. He would astound us with his ability to draw decent reproductions while his friends could only scribble lines. In his seven years, he has probably gone through about twenty or more reams of paper. Nathan gets a lot of artistic talent from both sides of the family (though it skipped his parents) and has taken some art classes. Most of his art work has been done at home when he gets in the mood to draw. When he is in that mood, it is best not to bother him too much.

Q: What was Nathan’s reaction to the book?

A: Since I created the book as a surprise for him, I wasn’t sure how he would react. When I brought the book home for the first time, I pulled it out of my bag and asked him if he’d like to see something I’d made. I don’t think he immediately recognized the front cover picture, but as soon as he saw his photo on the first page he thought it was the most amazing thing. It took him about five seconds to ask if he could make more and how much he could sell them for to his friends. I did get a little grief from him about picking pictures he drew when he “was just a little kid.”

Nathan with his book.

Q: Do you think this will be a multi-volume set?

We have been going through all of the kids’ artwork and are in the process of making this the permanent archive for the art instead of keeping a box that sits in a closet. Nathan has already made it clear that he needs more editorial involvement with the next volume.

The Inkubook staff can’t wait to see the next installment of Master McQuillan’s art. If you have a little budding Jackson Pollock or Mary Cassatt, it’s never too early to start a portfolio. With the free book promotion that Inkubook is currently offering, it’s the perfect time to get started!

This week at Inkubook we’re celebrating our sweetest treasures. No, not chocolate-dipped caramels. We’re talking about babies! They’re soft and cuddly and usually smell pretty sweet. Best of all, they make the perfect subjects for photo books.

We’re encouraging all parents, grandparents, godparents, primary caregivers, older siblings, aunts, and uncles to make a book to show the world how delightful their special little ones are with a FREE PHOTO BOOK. All you have to do is make a book and use the Invite Friends feature to show off your photo book to someone you know. (That person will be eligible for a free book, too.) You can read all the details on this page.

Previously we showed you some of the pretty new backgrounds we have for wedding-themed books, and we think babies deserve equal time in the blog. We have several color combination for baby backgrounds. Each includes a journal page so you can jot down the vital statistics and a few interesting memories about your precious tyke. Here are just a few swatches from our baby collections:

Swatches from Inkubook’s baby background collections.

Don’t miss out on this special opportunity to make a lasting treasure about a special little someone in your life.

When I got married a couple of years ago, I did a lot of my research on the Internet. It never once occurred to me, though, to specifically look for wedding blogs. Boy, am I sorry I missed out. I have since become much more familiar with the world of blogs, and I’m constantly impressed and awed by all the good information that turns up. So I decided to highlight a few wedding blogs that have recently come to my attention.

Snippet & Ink

Bear in mind that this collection only scratches the surface of the wedding blogs that are out there. You can pretty much find a wedding blog for any type of wedding you’re planning. Working with a budget of less than $2000? There’s a blog for you. Not interested in the traditional white or ivory and going for a specific theme like goth or all pink? There’s a blog for you, too. As time goes on and we find other interesting wedding blogs, I’ll give them a shout out here.

First is Snippet & Ink, a blog of daily wedding inspiration that’s been around for at least a year. Had I seen this blog with its beautiful inspiration boards and Real Wedding Saturday posts when I was planning my wedding, I probably never would have made it down the aisle. I would have been too conflicted about deciding which gorgeous idea I wanted to pursue. The little birds used in Deanna & Jesse’s wedding are just killing me. I want to have a whole flock.

Brenda’s Wedding Blog

Then there’s Brenda’s Wedding Blog, which is run by the owner of BestWeddingSites, a compendium of wedding-related resources. As on Snippet & Ink, Brenda features photos and details from some real weddings, and she has some fantastic suggestions about planning events. I love her recent series of posts about planning wedding-related events around a cupcake theme. She even has a directory of where to find cupcakeries. It makes me jealous that I wasn’t more imaginative when I was doing my own planning.

The last blog for today is Lucky in Love: Tips from the Wedding Gurus. This is a regional blog for residents of western Washington State (it’s part of banquetevent.com), but it has lots of information that’s not geographically specific. For example, the post from September 19 called “Great Read: Confessions of a Bad Wedding Guest” made me think that perhaps I need to be a little more conscientious about my etiquette when I’m invited to a wedding.

If you follow a particular wedding blog that you’d like to share with others, email ckughen at inkubook dot com to let me know about it.

You should also check out all our wedding-related book ideas. Right now, we’re offering free wedding photo books to new members. If you’re ready to get started on a book about your wedding, go ahead and join us!

So in Part I and Part II of “Making Photo Books: Planning Your Approach” I talked a little about deciding what type and style of Inkubook to make, and I gave some suggestions for how to get started on organizing your content. In this part I’m going to share a few ideas about things you can include in your book that you might not have already thought about and give you one more nugget of wisdom about preparing your files for uploading. If you’re not already on the edge of your seat, you should be, because first I’m going to suggest that you…

4. Make Scans of Miscellaneous Artwork, Memoribilia, and Documents

A scan of the recipe card for my grandmother’s coffee cake.

We talk a lot about “photo books” at Inkubook, but that doesn’t mean that every image you use in your book has to be a photo that you took with a digital camera. Most of us have odds and ends lying around that would be easy to scan and appropriate to use in a book. For example, when my husband and I make books about our family, we regularly scan artwork from school, letters to Santa, and official documents (like our marriage certificate). In the cookbook I’m working on, I might include a scan of the original recipe card for my grandmother’s coffee cake. That way it’ll be preserved forever even though the recipe has been transcribed to a nice, new book. Scans can add extra dimension to your photo book and can help round out the story you’re telling.

After I’ve made the scans, I make sure to place the files (or copies of them) in the same folder where the other images for my book are stored. In case you’ve forgotten, the reason I do this is because it saves me a little time and confusion if I don’t have to search my hard drive to cherry pick the files for my book. Whenever I’ve had to search a number of different folders to find the photos I need, I inevitably find myself returning to the same folder over and over again because I can’t remember that I’ve already checked there. It’s like when I have to drive around the block three times before I can finally get to the entrance of the parking garage, and that frustrates me. Better to just have everything collected in one place so that it’s ready to go.

After the scans are made and collected in the designated Inkubook folder, there’s just one last thing I like to do in relation to organizing my image files, and that’s…

5. Give the Photos Descriptive Names

As fancy as digital cameras might be, they don’t go the extra mile toward putting specific names on photos. Wouldn’t it be nice if the camera could identify your subject and give the picture a snazzy name instead of using IMG_0304? We can dream that it will happen one day, but for the time being, I often try to rename my photos with something descriptive.

Renaming your photos is especially helpful if you’re not copying all the files into one specific folder. Beyond that, if you use any page layouts that include caption boxes, you can save yourself some editing after your book is assembled. In layouts that use caption boxes (usually a small text box that’s very close to the photo box), the caption boxes are automatically populated with the filename of the photo. Sometimes I choose to not use the captions at all, in which case I just delete the text in the caption boxes. But when I am using captions, I don’t have to redo them all in the editor when I’ve already given the file a caption-like name. [Revision: A recent update to Inkubook changed this feature. Now caption boxes aren't automatically filled in with your filenames. Because I like words more than I like random letters and numbers, I'll probably still give my photo files descriptive names.]

The next part is the last in this series (for now). I’m very interested in hearing what suggestions you have because I’m always looking for ways I can do things more efficiently. Please share your ideas by sending a comment through our Feedback form!

In their FAQs, Picnik describe themselves thusly:

Picnik is photo editing awesomeness, online, in your browser. It’s the easiest way on the Web to fix underexposed photos, remove red-eye, or apply effects to your photos.

Seems like it would be tough to undersell yourself in a paragraph that uses the phrase “photo editing awesomeness,” but that’s just what Picnik does here. I previously posted on using GIMP to edit your images. While extremely powerful, GIMP is likely a little more tool than most users need. That is where Picnik comes in. Picnik offers the standard tools for rotating, cropping, and resizing your images, plus it has some additional tools like color adjustments, red-eye reduction and sharpening. All these things can be very valuable, but they don’t exactly exemplify “photo editing awesomeness.” The awesomeness comes in under the “Create” tab, where you can access a slew of filters and enhancements that achieve stunning effects with absolutely minimal effort.

Panography-ish Filter – Create Effects within Picnik

The interface for Picnik is perhaps the most usable I have seen for an image editing tool, better than even iPhoto. Applying effects is as easy as clicking a button and then playing with the associated sliders (even this description doesn’t do justice to the simplicity). There are 33 effects in total (two of these are available only to Premium Members). The results of all are dead-on and would require some heavy lifting in Phototoshop to achieve.

The samples below demonstrate the results of a handful of my favorite filters:

Original Image

Boost Effect

Cinemascope Effect

1960s Effect

The beauty of Picnik is that it provides an environment where you can play with your images without risk of destroying them, and once you get started it is, quite honestly, hard to stop. Best of all, Picnik is free. Some advanced features, like full-screen mode, additional effects, and the ability to work with a greater number of photos, are available for a $24.95 annual charge. It is a great way to add some awesomeness to the photos in your drop-dead gorgeous Inkubook.

When we first launched Inkubook, we started with a pretty basic palette of backgrounds. We had white, of course, but if you wanted to gussy up your pages with a little bit of color or creativity, your choices were limited to a rainbow of pastels or a creation of your own design (done in Photoshop or some other graphics program).

One of our first goals in making improvements to the site was to add a greater variety of backgrounds. We’re proud to say that we now have more than 200 backgrounds to choose from, and we’re working on adding more all the time!

Today we’d like to draw your attention to our collection of wedding-themed backgrounds. This isn’t to say that you couldn’t use any one of our backgrounds in your wedding book. For example, if you’re having a beach wedding you might prefer to use the backgrounds with the sandy white seashells or the festive flip-flops instead of the backgrounds that we’ve deemed “wedding-like.” But if you need a starting place, we have these two background families ready for you.

First is the Classic Wedding collection. When we look at these backgrounds, we think of romantic, traditional weddings that proceed to the accompaniment of string quartets. Have a look.

The Classic Wedding background swatches. (Click the image to make it larger.)

Don’t you feel like you should be watching the bride and her father swirl around the dance floor while you enjoy a few pillow mints with your luscious piece of cake and glass of champagne?

If that’s a little too traditional and staid for your style, we also have a collection that we call Modern Wedding. It’s every bit as pretty as the Classic Wedding collection, but it has a different appeal.

The Modern Wedding background swatches. (Click the image to make it larger.)

Among the backgrounds in both collections you’ll see a page to use for signatures in a guest book. If you’d like some ideas for what you might do when creating your own guest book, check out Inspiration: Make a Customized Guest Book.

A page from a sample wedding book.

It’s a little bit hard to imagine the full effect of the backgrounds from these little swatches, so if you’d like to see them in action on some pages of a wedding book, have a look at this PDF.

We keep a running list of backgrounds we’d like to add in the future, and we’d be very interested to hear what types of wedding backgrounds you’d like to have available for your wedding book. You can use our Feedback form to shoot us an email with your ideas.

Here at Inkubook, “We want to improve” is our middle name. Sure, it’s virtually impossible to fit on a standardized form, but getting better is important to us so we live with the inconvenience.

Getting better at what we do means taking the feedback we receive seriously. One thing that has come up often, both in responses to surveys we’ve done and in conversations you’ve had with our support staff, is that the full-page bleed layouts necessary to upload your very own scrapbook designs aren’t easily found. We plan to rectify that as best we can as soon as we can by making sure that the full-page bleed layout is available by default in the Layouts gallery. In the meantime, though, we’d like to give you some tips that might help you find it when you’re looking for it.

Currently the full-page layout for the 8.5″ x 8.5″ book is not in the Layouts gallery when you start a book. But we do have one. You just need to add it to your gallery so that you can place it on your pages. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Make sure you’re on a page of the book (not one of the covers) and click the Layouts tab.
2. Click More at the left end of the gallery. This will show you all the available layout options for this size book, and it looks like this: 
3. The full-page bleed layout that you’re looking for (one without any other photo or text continers) is in the second row, second from the left. See the picture below for the exact location. We’ve included a shockingly pink arrow and callout so you can’t miss it.
4. Click the layout then click Apply. It’ll be added to your Layouts gallery and will be placed on the active page.

Here’s where to find the full-page bleed layout in the 8.5″ x 8.5″ book.

In the 11″ x 8.5″ landscape book and the 8.5″ x 11″ portrait book, the full-page bleed layouts are a little easier to locate because they’re already in your Layouts gallery. There are two pictures below to show you exactly what you’re looking for.

This is where the full-page bleed layout is in gallery of the landscape book…

…and this is the location in the gallery of your portrait book.

You are now properly armed with the information you need to put your digital LOs (or scans of your traditional scrapbook pages) into a drop-dead gorgeous book.

Just so you know, one of the other bits of feedback we’ve received is the suggestion that we should create a feature that allows you to apply the same layout to every page. We think that’s a great idea. We don’t want anyone to get repetitive stress injury from having to drag the same layout onto every page of a book. This is a feature that we definitely plan to implement. In the meantime, we hope you’ll bear with us as we work through the list of all the things we want to do.

We’re standing by to hear more of your feedback, so please use our Feedback form to send us a note. Otherwise, we encourage you to get started on your book. If you make one that you’re really proud of and you’d like to share it with us, use the Invite Friends feature to send an invitation to ckughen at Inkubook dot com. If you give us permission to use it, your book might end up in one of our sample galleries!

One of our Inkubook members is a fantastic scrapper named Vicki. Actually, we’re pretty certain that lots of our members are fantastic scrappers, but Vicki gave us a shout out on her blog that really grabbed our attention and made us blush with pride.

Vicki, who lives across the pond in Bristol, UK, found out about our free book promotion, so she decided to try us out. She couldn’t possibly have been more complimentary in her review of us. Best of all, she was really pleased with her book when she received it. Check out the picture of one of her spreads.

A beautiful spread from Vicki’s Inkubook.

Not only is Vicki a scrapper, but she’s a designer, too. She’s currently in the process of releasing a set of elements called Autumn Dream, which has designs and colors that make us want to run through leaves on a crisp fall day before coming inside for some hot chocolate. Make sure to have a look; we’re certain they’ll make you have that autumnal feeling, too.

If you’re into scrapping, check back tomorrow for some hints on how to find the elusive full-page bleed layouts necessary to upload pages you’ve designed. We’ve had lots of questions about that, so we’ll have some answers for you. Please let us know what other comments you have or what problems we can help solve. And if you’re ready to get stated making your own Inkubook of LOs, hop on over to the site and sign in.

Last week, Jason Kottke pointed to a blog post by renowned movie critic Roger Ebert. The post, in and of itself, is fascinating as it describes how to “read” a movie by freezing a frame and then discussing the various aspects of the shot. Of course analyzing a single frame of a film is no different than analyzing a still photograph. For that reason, the post provides tremendous insight into how to compose shots. In particular, the following paragraph is so rich in information that it could be the curriculum for an entire course on photography.

In simplistic terms: Right is more positive, left more negative. Movement to the right seems more favorable; to the left, less so. The future seems to live on the right, the past on the left. The top is dominant over the bottom. The foreground is stronger than the background. Symmetrical compositions seem at rest. Diagonals in a composition seem to “move” in the direction of the sharpest angle they form, even though of course they may not move at all. Therefore, a composition could lead us into a background that becomes dominant over a foreground. Tilt shots of course put everything on a diagonal, implying the world is out of balance. I have the impression that more tilts are down to the right than to the left, perhaps suggesting the characters are sliding perilously into their futures. Left tilts to me suggest helplessness, sadness, resignation. Few tilts feel positive. Movement is dominant over things that are still. A POV above a character’s eyeline reduces him; below the eyeline, enhances him. Extreme high angle shots make characters into pawns; low angles make them into gods. Brighter areas tend to be dominant over darker areas, but far from always: Within the context, you can seek the “dominant contrast,” which is the area we are drawn toward. Sometimes it will be darker, further back, lower, and so on. It can be as effective to go against intrinsic weightings as to follow them.

Holy cow, that is a lot of information! To get a better understanding, let’s break it down into a quick cheat sheet:

The downward angle makes poor Diva seem insignificant

Direction

• Right is Good, Left is Bad
• Up is Strong, Down is Weak
• Foreground is Strong, Background is Weak

Movement

• Right is Future, Left is Past
• Symmetry implies no movement
• Diagonals move toward the sharpest angle

Tilt

• Tilts imply chaos
• Tilt to the right is sliding into the future
• Tilt to the left indicates sadness

Point of View

• Shooting from above reduces the subject
• Upward shots empower the subject

The subtle messages buried in the composition of a photograph can often be tough to grasp. You can tell by the words used by Ebert that in as much as we would like to break this down into a science, it is ultimately how an image makes you feel that is the best clue to its meaning.

In Part I of “Making Photo Books: Planning Your Approach,” I started at the beginning, which is making the decision about what type and style of book you’re going to make. Those are often somewhat easy decisions. Now you get to start on what I consider to be the good part, which is actually organizing the content of your book. When I make an Inkubook, I first…

2. Make an Outline

The outline for my cookbook.

Whoa, take it easy. I can sense that your eyes just widened in horror. There’s no need to panic. I’m not talking about the kind of outline your eighth-grade teacher made you do for your paper about genetic traits in fruit flies. I’m talking about a simple breakdown of the order of your book. For example, I’m working on a cookbook so that I have the recipes I use frequently in one location. I’m tired of searching through a pile of loose papers every time I want to make some delicious French toast. So I’ve made an outline of how I want to organize the content of the cookbook. There’s a photo of my outline in this post.

Before you dismiss this idea as totally over-the-top, über-organized planning, give it a little consideration. It’s easy to rearrange and add pages to your Inkubook, but it’s even easier to erase and rearrange with your pencil or in a word-processing document. A small amount of up-front planning can help you have a better book in the end. And if you happen to have some nostalgic feelings about those eighth-grade papers, The OWL at Purdue has an excellent resource on developing outlines.

With the outline out of the way, I’m ready to…

3. Sort Through and Separate Photos

Because I know what my book is about and the rough order the content will be in, I also have some idea of what photos will be in it. So I take a little time to find them and put them all in one folder. You see, my husband takes care of most of the photo management in our house, and he’s every bit as organized as I am. (We’re truly a match made in heaven.) His system of filing photo files is so elaborate that it can sometimes take me quite some time to figure out what’s where. By giving some thought to what pictures I need, I can find them and copy them all to one Inkubook folder so that I need to browse to only one place when I upload my photos, which makes that step incredibly quick and easy.

Doing this preparation doesn’t mean that in the middle of making a book I don’t sometimes think, “Oh, crikey! I forgot that picture of the dog in the life vest,” but it does minimize the amount of time I have to spend searching for photos when I’m in the midst of the excitment of making the book. Collecting the photos ahead of time keeps me from losing my groove, if you know what I’m saying.

In Part III of “Making Photo Books: Planning Your Approach,” I’ll suggest a couple more tips for collecting and organizing your photos. In the meantime, leave a comment to tell me if you have any special tricks for organizing your photo books.