At the end of last week, I ordered some photos from Photobox. They had an offer on 75 photo credits for £5 + £2.99 p&p, so I took the opportunity to upload a pile of photos from Flickr and have them printed. (That offer seems to have expired now, but they have different promotions all the time.)
I have to say that the Photobox website left me extremely frustrated. The direct upload from Flickr wasn’t working, so I had to download all the photos I wanted and then upload them to Photobox. Which. Took. AGES. I resorted to uploading them in batches of 10, and it took a good couple of hours for them all to go through. And then, because my photos are square, I had to go in and manually edit each of the 75 images to centre it on a 6×4 piece of paper, rather than having them cropped, which is the default setting. If I’d realised that ahead of time, I’d have batch processed them all to 6×4 in Photoshop, which would have been much quicker.
That said, I’m really pleased with the photos themselves, and the speed of delivery. There are a few where I’ve tweaked the colours too much and they haven’t printed well, but that’s my problem not theirs. The quality of the prints overall is really nice.
Last night, in a fun-filled bout of insomnia, I sat down and trimmed the white edges away from each print, and stuck them into a folder filled with A4 sheets of sugar paper. What I want to do is use the photos for inspiration, and fill the pages with sketches based on elements from the photos. It might be shape, colour, texture… who knows.
I keep looking at online courses in “creative journalling” or “artistic sketchbooks” or “unleashing your inner artist”… that kind of thing. Trouble is, I actually know perfectly well how to do all of that stuff already. My problem isn’t so much with lack of creativity, as lack of confidence and motivation. I’m hoping that by spending time messing about in a scrapbook, making small experimental pieces that aren’t for sale – in fact aren’t “for” anything, will eventually lead me to bigger, more creative work.
Now I’m just hoping that the scrapbook itself isn’t going to turn into a lesson in not using 20 year old invisible mounts that I found in the back of a cupboard while sorting out all my old photos. I suspect they’re old enough not to be acid free, and if all the photos fall out when I pick up the folder in six months’ time, I might have to have a little cry!