The Joy of Ordinary

Telling My Story

Posted on Apr 14th, 2010 in Scrapbooking | 1 comment

I haven’t blogged much lately but I have been working to tell my story. I’ve been scrapbooking quite a bit and thinking about scrapbooking even more.

Story. Vision. It’s something I’ve been reflecting on a lot this year. I suppose it really started last year when I read “Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision” by David DeChumin. I highly recommend this book to photographer and scrapbookers alike. It really made me think about what I want to capture in my own life- through words, photography, and scrapbooking. What is your vision? how can you communicate what you see? Not so much vision as in some grand thing- but your vision of the moment, what is it you want to capture, what is it that evokes emotion in you. . . How can you convey that to others? In the book, he talks alot about how a powerful image needs to evoke emotion and that it takes more to evoke emotion with other people than just when you see your image- you have the reference of having been there. He also talks about capturing the broad and the detail. As I started scrapbooking again this year, I can’t help but think about how much of that carries over to the scrapbook page.

Part of sharing a vision or any story is “why”. After I started Library of Memories, I wrote about “Why” on the forums of my Design Your Life Class (both classes are at Big Picture Scrapbooking). It was in response to a question about journaling the who, what, when, where on scrapbook layouts and was inspired by an assigment in LOM where we idientified the 5 W’s in our layouts. Here’s what I wrote about “Why”:

There are 5 W’s and you left out the really meaningful one- WHY!

What about the connections you see if the photos or the events? To the one you are scrapbooking or perhaps a different time. Why was it a good time? Why did you go there? Why is the one W that really doesn’t fit in a title or on an embellishment. It’s the one that really talks about your mark in this world and your history. It’s the one that truly gives insightful info about the people or the event in the picture. And that’s just skimming the surfaces with why’s.

My project 365 has been another huge inspiration this year. I find it really makes you look at life as if you are the reporter. . . and for me now it’s about sharing my vision of our life.

Then, when I got my new Iphone (Oh I haven’t even told you all that Cody and I both now have Iphones), I started listening to the Paperclipping Roundtable Podcasts and have found several of them to be true gems. One of which was Episode 3, “Ali Edwards on Story”. After listening to that podcast, I picked up the book StoryTellers which I’ve started reading in little bits.

Here’s a few of the layouts I’ve created lately- capturing our story. my story.