Beginning the journey to Photo Freedom

Class started yesterday and I’ll admit that I have pretty mixed feelings right now. I’m excited at the possibilities I see. My current “system” isn’t working very well. Probably because I don’t have much of a system in place. My digital photos are mostly stored chronologically on my computer, but that’s where the system ends. Lately I’ve been wanting to make non-event kinds of layouts and I haven’t been able to find some of the older photos I wanted to include. That’s totally crazy! I had been planning to start importing all my photos into Lightroom and tagging them, but I don’t think even that would be enough. Yes, I’d be able to find my photos, but would I be making meaningful pages? I needed a change in mind-set.

I heard a couple of weeks ago that Stacy Julian was starting up another LOM class – now revamped and renamed Finding Photo Freedom. I agonized over taking the class. I’ve always put my pages in albums chronologically and I was pretty happy with that. The organization freak in me really balked at the idea of the LOM system because it’s not quite as structured as storing pages chronologically – or is it? I also wondered how useful the system would be since I scrap most of my layouts digitally. Since I’m working with mostly digital photos and I already have Lightroom I figured that the only real $$ investment right now is the cost of the class itself and anything I do in terms of moving pages around could be undone if I don’t like the LOM system. So I decided to take the plunge and I’m really glad I did!

I’m still a bit apprehensive about the using the different categories/binders. I tend to overthink things and I’m a bit afraid that it will take me too much time to decide where to put some of the layouts. Chronological albums are a lot more straightforward. I think I’m going to like it, though. I’m excited about the thought of creating layouts that are about relationships and not just about the things that we do. I’m also determined to print out layouts more often and have the albums stored where they’re easily accessible by everyone in the family – we just have to figure out where that will be.

I think my strongest emotion right now is exhaustion. I imported one month’s photos into Lightroom yesterday, then started to purge the ones I really don’t want to keep. I knew this step was going to be difficult, but I had no idea just how hard it would be. I have never been in the habit of deleting photos. If I take it, I keep it. When I started p365 in January I finally started purging some of my photos on a regular basis. RAW photos take up a lot of hard drive space and I realized that I couldn’t keep all the photos I take anymore. It’s much easier to delete photos that I took last week than it is to delete photos from 7 years ago. Of the 171 photos I imported from February 2006, I deleted 59 photos that were either really blurry or duplicates. It was hard and I was exhausted when I finished. It did feel good, though, and I don’t regret it today. I certainly hope it gets easier, because I have thousands and thousands of digital photos to sort through.

One of the things that we were supposed to do before the beginning of the class was to determine our “Enough Quotient” or EQ. What is the minimum amount I need to get done to feel successful (or at least satisfied) with my memory keeping? I always have more projects ongoing that I could possibly complete and I take more pictures than I could possibly ever scrap. So how much is enough? After much thought, this is what I came up with. I suppose I should revisit it in a couple of months and see if it really works.

• Weekly: (1) Spend 15 minutes, 5 times a week working with my photos. (2) Scrap 2-3 pages. (3) Import and tag 5 digital scrapbooking products.
• Monthly: (1) Scrap a “monthly highlights” page. (2) Scrap 1 non-event page per person (included in weekly layouts).
• This Year: (1) Get LOM albums set up and completed layouts (paper and digital) in albums. This does not include the layouts I have in CM albums. (2) Store albums in living area of house so that they are easy to access and view.
• Home: Put family photos on wall in living room.
• Online: (1) Figure out where to put layouts/photos online for easy extended family viewing. (2) Blog more often about life in general.

I’ll let you know how it goes 🙂