photographs are getting organised, but its making me sad.

I spent a constructive evening last night starting to file my photographs in to the new archival binders. I am so pleased with these and it makes it much easier to look at all my photos and store them safely in a tidy chronological order. In their old albums the glue was changing colour so starting to damage these photos, so I am glad I have rescued them in time.

However going through my photos made me quite sad because of the really poor quality of my photos when the children were small. These were taken in the pre-digital days when we had to wait for a week or so after the event to see the photos, so you did not know how good or bad they would turn out until they were developed - ie when we got back from holiday when it was impossible to retake them. Printing was expensive - so we could only take a few and my photo technique was so poor that the children are far away in the distance - no lovely close ups of their beautiful faces.

These are a couple of typical old photos and when you compare these to the type of photos I take now (this one of Liam below), it shows how difficult scrapping with theseold photos is.

When I look at the photos that scrapbookers take of their children today - using digital cameras and much better techniques I am so very envious and wish I was a scrapbooker with a digital camera when they were little.

Look at this layout I have found on 2 peas.

I have 2 distant photos of Eleanor just standing up in her dress up nurses outfit. This scrapper has photographed her daughter playing nurse - so a much better context and the photos are lovely & close up.

I also cannot remember, the finer details of their lives, what silly or special little things they said & did - which I see frequently on today's layouts.

Its obviously too late for me to recreate my children's childhood, but I will try and ensure that I don't make the same mistake with any grandchildren I may have. I am glad I have a scanner so that I can try and crop and enlarge some old photos. I am not confident that this will be the answer as the actual quality of many of the photos is not good and will deteriorate further being scanned & cropped, but I can try and make them a bit more presentable.