After the scan: Getting started on (and finishing) a collage

After I finish the scanning process, it's time to get started! As I scan the photos I make note of all of them and try to figure out placement and size of the images. If it's a wedding collage and I have individual photos of the bride and groom, I try to put those in the corners as anchors. If it's an anniversary, I try to find photos of the couple together throughout the years and use those as corner photos. Unlike a puzzle, I start from the edges and work in rather than from the center and work out. There really isn't a formula to how I work, but there are things that I find I do repeatedly, like using certain photos as corner anchors. Again, it really all depends on what I'm given by the client.

Above you can see how I began the 70th birthday collage. There were several images that I liked of her alone, but decided on the portrait type image to anchor the lower left corner. It had nice cool colors and blended well in with the background. Most of the photos of her were in black and white, so I thought a color photo would balance out the background nicely. I then kind of worked around, placing other images of her by herself in somewhat of a timeline, then decided to use the family image to anchor the upper right corner. 

I had initially started to fill in small photos of her extended family, then found this photo of all of the family together and decided to place that one and remove the smaller pictures so it wouldn't be too crowded. The more photos I'm given, the more I have to shrink things to get them all to fit and more times than not it ends up looking more messy than a unified whole. The elimination process is a difficult one if I'm not given a whole lot of direction about the importance of the pictures by the client.

This was the first draft that I submitted to the client for approval. (Actually I added one more photo after I took this screen shot, but this is pretty close to the first draft.) It turned out that my decision to try to consolidate by eliminating family wasn't the best choice and that she would've rather have had less photos of her mom and dad together and more photos of the family because the family was very important to her mom. So I shrunk some of the photos and removed two to make room for the individual photos. She also requested that I add the word "Candy" to the collage because that is her mom's nickname. Words are always easy to add after the fact because they can be blended so as not to interfere with the photos. Adding more photos (or taking away photos that I've used in key places) is more difficult because I have to shift things around so as not to leave holes.

So...after making the changes, this was the final collage: 

Not too drastically different from the first proof that I showed the client, but tweaked enough that she was extremely pleased with the result. I told her to let me know what her mother's reaction is to it because I always like to hear feedback. On several occasions I've heard that the gift has moved people to tears, and that's probably the highest compliment I could ever receive. I enjoy what I do immensely and that I can bring joy to others makes it very worthwhile. I think it's so great to be able to take photos that otherwise would rarely see the light of day and give them life again.

If you're interested in having a custom collage done, please visit my website for more information!

Thanks to Kat Christopherson for allowing me the pleasure of working with her on this collage for her mother's birthday.

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.