Capturing the personal touch in a computer culture
WHEN Lianna Vigil came upon the only known photo of her maternal great-grandmother last year, the avid scrapbooker instantly pictured it in one of her albums. She also counted 10 close kin who would want to share the treasure. She had to create only a single album, however, thanks to digital scrapbooking, a thriving segment of the memory trade that’s making more crafters like Vigil ditch paper and glue in favor of drag and drop.
Scanning Great-Grandma Josephine into her PC, Vigil designed her entire album with bytes and checked off every member of her family Christmas list, lickety-split.
“I thought, ‘Why do the same thing 10 times and buy all that paper when I can just do it once and print 10 copies?’ ” recalls the 39-year-old Huntington Beach website manager.
Digital scrappers use common photo-editing software to arrange digital or scanned photographs, text and embellishments on their scrapbook pages. Completed pages can be printed and bound, burned onto CDs and DVDs or e-mailed. They can be enhanced with home videos, music and narration, and downloaded to an iPod.
There’s no cleanup, and pages can be redesigned without sacrificing pricey materials. Don’t like the color, position or size of that photo? Change it with a click. “I try things with digital that I wouldn’t try with my paper,” Vigil says. “I can be more creative.”
Considered revolutionary among traditional scrappers only a few years ago, the niche has been expanding along with the explosion of digital cameras: 20.5 million Americans bought them in 2005, while only about one-fifth that many purchased film cameras, according to PMA Market Research, a trade association of photo imaging retailers and processors worldwide based in Jackson, Mich.
Meanwhile, Epson, Sony, Polaroid and other photo giants have entered the field with specialized products, and related websites have mushroomed. Hewlett-Packard Co. has introduced kiosks for retail outlets, including one at an Albertsons in Huntington Beach, where shoppers can lay out their own albums while printing their digital photos. The number of registered users on Scrapbook Bytes, among the most popular websites, has soared to 47,000 since its 2003 inception. Founder Amy Edwards is seeing more newbies now than even a year ago, many of them traditionalists.
“I’m starting to see a lot more people on our message boards saying, ‘I’m new to the site, how do I do it?’ ” Edwards says.
Of course, computer-assisted creativity will always be anathema to some. But one of the latest twists among memory keepers is combining the best of both worlds for a marriage of scissors and pixels. Lately, digital scrapbooking has also been introducing handicrafts to an unlikely crowd, says Pamela Smart, co-editor of Creative TECHniques Magazine, which premieres in May.
“These are people who work on computers all day,” Smart says, “who’ve found something else they can do with their computers but may not ever have sat down with a paper trimmer.”
