It's been awhile since I've said anything about photobooks here, even though I've been plugging away at them for years! I've completed 32 of them now (!!!!!) and have 6 (!!) more in progress right now (as well as one more, our Michigan vacation, that I could start). These take up not a small amount of time but I work on them nearly every week we are not on vacation so it's in small bit and pieces here and there.
I have a lot of thoughts about anticipating, experiencing, and remembering selves and the HOURS I have spent on photobooks definitely falls into the remembering self! I get to experience whole chunks of our lives 3 different times that way and I think that really affects how much I remember. I've been thinking that should be a whole post but...photobooks definitely play into that.
The Beginning
Scrapbooking used to be my one crafty thing. My sisters and I all got into that a little over 20 years ago. I know I made scrapbooks for high school and I graduated over 20 years ago! Then I have another book for college and kept those up once we got married. Then we got Luke and my free time greatly diminished. That's when I started photobooks which turned out to be much, faster, cheaper, and smaller. Wins all around! Now, 9 years and 32 photobooks later...I know a bit more about what I am
doing but the real challenge is making the time for them.
The Company
I have been using Picaboo for many years. I've done 20 books with them and all my in process books are there. I've been ordering the boys' books (since they close around the same time) together for the last couple years to save a few bucks on shipping so those are slightly cheaper but the stand alone books I order come in right at $80.98. I ALWAYS wait for the "free extra pages" sale which they seem to run every month or every other month. I haven't found any other sale that saves me as much money. Once I order I usually get in about a week! It's always exciting to receive until I flip through it and realize that it looks exactly what I spent hours staring at on my screen. (I go through this every. single. time.) But the boys and Matt haven't seen it yet so it's slightly more exciting for them.
The Time
I have for many years, set aside Monday night once the boys are in bed to work on them. That's Matt's night to give Sam his bath, supervise Luke getting ready for bed (aka not taking 45 minutes to shower), and get them both to bed. (I have Tuesday and Thursday.) So I can typically get to these about 8:30 during the school year and try to have my computer off about 9:45 so I can read for a bit before bed. That's a pretty solid hour to work on them each week.
My priority during that time is usually to catch up our annual family yearbook. It's always fun to stick in pictures from things we had just done over the past weekend! Yay for instant reliving! If I'm wrapping up a book or trying to make a self-imposed deadline for one of the other books then I'll work on those instead but I try to keep ours the most up to date.
The other main time I work on them is Saturday afternoons over what used to be quiet time. Sam still does quiet time when Luke's at school and we had some version of it over the summer with Luke at home...but on weekends that's all out the window. But on weekends we are home, and not in the middle of a big outside project (like cleaning out the garage), then I try to spend an hour or so working on photobooks, especially if I'm in the middle of 6...
Since I track my time, I can tell you that in 2021 I spent 59 hours on photobooks, 61 hours in 2020. To date, I'm at 29 hours for 2022 (low!). That breaks down to a little over an hour a week, a little more than that when I take out the weeks we're on vacation or it's Christmas or whatever and I don't work on them.
 |
| 2021 Instagram Collage to finish the book |
In Process
The six books I am currently in the middle of?
1) There's our annual, calendar year, yearbook. That one is mine & Matt's and covers all family activities. 2 & 3) Then each of the boys get a book that covers from one birthday to the next. I have started each of their new ones since their March birthdays but neither are past the spring...
4) Maine vacation I made it a goal to get it done by the end of the month and I have made reasonable progress on it. The problem is we took so many pictures that I like and narrowing it down, making sure each day gets the right number of pages!
5 & 6) Art books for both of the boys although this is a project that has sat largely dormant over the summer. In the fall when we are back to being home more I'll get back to it!
Then, like I said above, I could also have started the Michigan book but need to finish Maine first. We took much fewer pictures in Michigan so it should go quicker!
Keeping up 3 books with very similar content might seem like a lot and sometimes it is. But, I want my boys to have a good collection of their childhood pictures when they eventually move out. My Mom, somehow, kept up photo albums for all SIX of us (although each of us took over much of the actual putting in albums when we were pre-teens or so) and I treasure having so many pictures of my childhood. Now, with everything digital, I could also give the boys full digital copies (on a very large external harddrive) of everything but there is something so special about having them curated and in a physical form!
And those physical books? The boys actually look at them quite a bit. They've both reached ages where they know to be careful with them, to not tear the pages and not fight over them. At least a few times a week they'll pull some down to look through. And, of course, they both especially love their personal books since they each feature very heavily in those. There are all sorts of cries of "Oh yeah! I remember that!" when they are looking at the books. I love that they are getting to enjoy them already!
The day Luke started kindergarten was VERY hard on me. I started crying the night before and then most of the actual day. Sam was teeny tiny then and went down for a nap fairly early that morning after school drop-off and I spent a good hour going through all of Luke's finished photobooks, going through his 5th birthday, remembering that just because it felt like we had JUST brought him home, we really did pack a lot of memories into those 5 years. It made me appreciate the time I had with him at home and realize that it didn't go that fast. I think I'll do the same next year when Sam starts!
If keeping up multiple books for multiple kids is something that interests you but sounds overwhelming, at least on the ones I use, there is the option to copy a book so you could always make one master book and then copy over and add/remove a few pages here and there as necessary.
The Content
Our book always maxes out at 90 pages. I recap each month with a page of random pictures of the boys that also has a list of things they each are liking that month. Then I do a general month recap page of projects or things that didn't warrant a whole page but I'd like 1-2 pictures to be included. I rarely give any single picture it's own page in our book, there just isn't space. Then different activities/holidays/events get their own pages as needed. Christmas gets 6-8 to cover our time at home as well as different celebrations. Each of the boys get a full spread for their birthday. I do a month recap of all zoo trips that month when we have a pass. I always finish the books with a collage of all my Instagram pictures from the year (a process I detailed here and still follow!) I write captions on most of the pages with the dates and a little bit about what it was or what we did.
The boys' books are usually in the mid-high 80s, sometimes they hit 90. I include much the same in theirs except they feature more in the pictures in their own books (I aim to keep it somewhat even in the family book). I do the month recap page for each of them with their list of things they like (that's why I keep the family book the most updated, when I am inevitably behind on their books, at least I can copy that list from the family one!). I also include all our vacations in their books, although much abbreviated compared to the whole book for each trip. Never more than a 2 page spread for a single day of a trip, sometimes just 1 page, depending on what we did/how many pictures we took.
I have a whole bunch of pages I include in the back of each of their books, like photos of their room around their birthday, their general schedule around their birthday, a collage of family pictures from their past year, and a letter from Mom & Dad (but really, I've written the last many myself). It's always amazing to look back and see how things change even when it doesn't feel like they are changing!
For our vacation books, I do very few captions, almost none. Instead I do a cover page for each day with the date, what day of our trip it is, and a brief outline of the day (ate hotel breakfast, drove 800 miles, stopped 3 times, kept driving, got to Maine...except maybe slightly more detail than that). Then, using the travel journals I keep up on our trips, I do a journal like entry on a final page for each day saying what exactly we did, any observations, things the boys liked, etc. I don't need a caption under a picture of the Arch to know it's the Arch but I do like having some the details for the trip for each page.
The Conclusion...
My time tracking tells me I spent almost exactly 100 hours on Instagram in 2021. That's about 2 hours a week. That's more time than I spent on photobooks. One of those certainly is more fulfilling (although I do appreciate many things about Instagram!). For a relatively small time commitment each week and a not large amount of money, it's definitely worth it. We love having so many memories committed to books! The only problem is how many we're accumulating...I'll need to rethink how I display them soon!
If you have questions about my process or anything, I'll try to help!
Other Photobook Posts
Photography part 2 - Do Something With Your Pictures
Our Photobook Has Arrived - 2014 yearbook
Our Annual Photobook Has Arrived - 2016 yearbook
A Photobook Update - Feb 2018
No comments:
Post a Comment