Take a Picture-of-the-Day!

Preserving your family's photos and the memories that go along with them can be accomplished in so many ways.  There are numerous variations on the theme...  you can scrapbook traditionally with patterned paper, cardstock, stickers, and embellishments, or you can create entirely digital pages.  You can organize and store your photos in boxes or photo albums, with very little decoration.  You can regularly and carefully scrap every picture you take, building a careful record of your family's life together, or you can choose a favorite picture when the mood strikes you, and make a fabulous one-photo artistic creation, celebrating a particular moment or person.

About five years ago I took up traditional scrapbooking and have greatly enjoyed it as a creative endeavor as well as a way to keep my family's memories.  It feeds my spirit to blend papers and photos and other fun things into something beautiful to look at.  I definitely enjoy the process, all by itself, as well as the end result.

Something I've done this year that's a bit different, in addition to creating traditional scrapbook pages of family events, milestones, etc. is to try to take a picture-of-the-day.  This idea of a-photo-a-day has been around online for a while.  I am using a particular product made just for this approach (found here) but you don't have to.  (I'm sharing the idea of picture-a-day, not the particular way you might organize the photos you take.)

The concept of a-photo-a-day encourages you to focus less on special occasions and events and more on the everyday, the stuff that happens Sunday to Monday, all year long.  I've really enjoyed how "needing" to take that daily picture has helped me record things that I might have otherwise missed.  For example, a shot of the exterior of the dance studio we went to several times a week for years, but I had never taken a picture of... family members doing a puzzle... the mess I make when I am working on a project at my desk... the pile of cold medicines on the counter when we are all sick... the entrance to my neighborhood, visible from the driver's seat of my car...  the crazy-hot temperature outside on a North Carolina summer day.  Years from now you'll appreciate having pictures of these everyday things, in addition to shots of birthdays, vacation trips, and opening presents on Christmas Day.

Now, of course you don't want the photo-a-day thing to become just another burden or something that you can "get behind" with.  Please.  We don't want or need that.  So if you get distracted and forget to take a picture for a few days, hey, no biggie. 

You could even give the camera to the kids or grandkids one or two days a week and let them take the picture-of-the-day.  I bet they'd have great ideas.

Go ahead -- take a picture-of-the-day today!