History

Family photos are one of the home’s most treasured items. Why not add beauty and value throughout your living space by choosing to decorate with family photos? Here are 4 great ways that you can turn your home into a work of art using your snapshots, a little handy work, and a lot of imagination. Enjoy!

1.In the Hallway
Hallways are like blank canvases, ready to be turned into a masterpiece. To add some flair to your hallway, consider enlarging one of your family photos and have it mounted on canvas to be hung in a unique frame above a small decorative table.

2.In the Living Room
In the living room, adding a coffee table book can make all the difference for your visitors. Instead of an interesting book of photography, consider making a unique Photo Album to set out for guests to view during your next occasion.

3.In the Playroom
Kids will love it when you turn their favorite photographs into a colorful mobile using string, clothespins, a plastic circle, and a whole lot of imagination! Make it with your child for an extra special activity.

4.In the Bedroom
Turn an empty wall into a gallery space by installing several shelves of varying sizes and placing framed photographs, vases, or other decorative items on them to add character and to create ambiance.

In a recent New York Times article by Noam Cohen, readers discovered the magic of Flickr and how it has greatly impacted the future of photographic archiving.

A little over a year ago, the Library of Congress started adding photographs with no known restrictions to a Flickr service called the Commons. Starting with 3,500 photos, this gallery has since grown with additions of about 50 per week. In a report assessing the project, the library detailed the information that had been gleaned from Flickr users, rendering the project a complete success. This move just goes to show the importance of preserving historic photographic memories using future technology. Yes, it is possible to blend the two successfully!

“Flickr is to photography what the Pacific Ocean is to water, what Times Square is to humanity,” the cultural critic Luc Sante wrote in an essay for the January-February 2008 issue of Photograph magazine. “Flickr is a great leveler, sweeping away distinctions between amateurism and expertise, art and record-keeping.”

While your home may not be the setting of a pivotal historic event, it’s no less important. To start preserving your photographic memories, blend a bit of old and new by using digital photographs and traditional Photo Albums from StorePhotos.com. Trust us, these memories will last a lifetime as a result!

Scrapbooking is the art of preserving memories – with a sense of personality and style, of course.  We all spend numerous hours planning, organizing, and putting together layouts so we can preserve a little piece of our own personal history.  But have you ever stepped back and wondered how this started?  Not the history itself, but the tradition of scrapbooking?  If you ever pondered this question, like I have, you’ll be delightfully surprised by the rich history of scrapbooking.

The earliest forms of scrapbooking can be dated back to ancient Greece, where evidence of  journal-like notebooks were uncovered that were filled with what the owner of the notebook found important or worth remembering in their life.  In the 15th and 16th centuries, when paper became more affordable, the practice of keeping important information (e.g. recipes, quotes, poems, etc), or commonplace book keeping, became popular in England.  This organizing of information worth keeping in a special book would be the pre-cursor to modern scrapbooking.

It was not until the advent of photography that scrapbooking began to change into the personal art form we know today.  In the late 1800’s, when photography became more widely available to the  populace, people were able to take their own pictures of family and friends, which they would place among newspaper clippings and notations about the picture, in a scrapbook.  From there people began experimenting with different page layouts and themes to make their scrapbooks look more unique.

Today scrapbooking is an industry that drives more than 2 billion dollars in sales each year, with a close-knit following of people who participate in the hobby.  People of all ages and from all walks of life participate in social outlets, ranging from small, local meetings to larger organized retreats and conventions.

If you are interested in becoming a part of the scrapbooking culture (i.e. History), visit StorePhotos.com and take a look at our selection of Scrapbook Kits to get yourself started.  And remember, the most important part of scrapbooking is to Scrap Often and Scrap Happy!