Beginning a custom collage

As I promised, today's blog is about how I start a custom collage. I just finished working on a custom collage for a 70th birthday and I'm going to document the steps I take to create a collage in the next few blogs.

THE SCANNING

More often than not I receive prints rather than digital images. I prefer people allow me to do the scanning rather than do it themselves because it allows me to enlarge photos if necessary rather than using software to do the enlarging. It also gives me a chance to leave in pieces of photos that I think give a collage an artistic quality that others may crop out: like the white borders around prints from the 40s-60s or writing on photos.

I usually ask people to give me some sort of idea what the importance of the photos are, or group them together in some way so I can make a better judgement of what to leave in and what will be okay to take out. I try to keep in as much as I can, but usually I find unnecessary repetition. 10 pictures of Mom & Dad through the years I will include all 10; 10 pictures of Mom & Dad in the last 2 years I'll probably keep 3 or 4. That's not to say that I don't want people to send all 10 of Mom & Dad. It's better to have too many to choose from than try to fill space with very few images.

This client separated the photos into 4 bags: her mom growing up, her mom's parents and siblings, her mom and dad, and her mom's children and their families.

I took the photos out of their bags but kept them in their respective categories when I scanned. You can see that there is a big range of ages of photos, which is great. I know that not everyone can get photos from way back, but the older photos definitely give a collage character. The client also gave me a newspaper article that was about her mom being crowned "Miss Fairwood Park" and 2 photos from an Elvis concert. Very cool.

THE ELIMINATION PROCESS

I always scan in everything a client gives me because I never know what I'm going to use and what I'm going to keep out, unless there are 2 photos that are very similar. In that case I will pick the best and choose not to scan one of them. I only charge for the scans of the photos I end up using for the collage. In the 70th birthday collage this is what I scanned and what I ended up using:

There were 16 photos of mom growing up. I used 14.

There were 5 photos of mom's parents and her siblings. I used 4.

There were 22 photos of mom and dad. I used 13.

There were 10 photos of the entire family. I used all 10. 

Overall: 41 photos.

It was a constant elimination process to decide what to leave in and what to leave out, and as you'll see in the next blog, very few photos go in one place and stay there throughout the duration of the collage creation.