Project Life 01

Project Life is a scrap booking style of photography combined with documentation (i.e. journaling) with a layer of stamping, typing and ephemera. It’s really up to the documented to decide what their album looks like. Project Life, started by Becky Higgins many years ago, was actually a product you could buy that came with journal cards. The cards came in a kit (baby, seasons, celebrations, holiday, etc.). These days there are many others who create these kits. These kits are now physical or digital. I have used both but my style and process these days is using the physical kits. I use kits from Ali Edwards and Studio Calico. I found these to be the best style for me. For each of these kits they come on a monthly basis. I recently stopped with Studio Calico because they discontinued their documented kit. Now I have two separate kits from Ali Edwards.

I have been keeping a yearly project life album since 2018. Each year follows the same process although it has evolved over the years as I figure out what works best for me. To give you an idea, here’s an outline of my monthly process.

1. Take photos several times per week. I feel that there will be days where I take zero photos and others where I take 200. My main goals is to capture life events each week.
   • Take photos using my cameras and phone
     • Heart photos on my phone for later
       • Capture screen shots of the calendar app, weather, etc.
2. At the end of each week, using the blue tooth or wi-fi feature on my camera, I download the .jpg images (not full size) to my iPhone or iPad.
3. Then, I take the SD card and plug it into my MacBook and I download all of my photos using Photo Mechanic to my Samsung T7 SSD. I organize the photos by month and year. Outside of sports photography, I save files in both large JPG and Raw formats.
4. When the end of each month comes, I have all the photographs I need. Next, using either my phone or laptop, I open the Photos app and “heart” all of the photos I want to use in the album.
   • I use a combination of landscape and portrait images.
5. I would estimate that I use between 40-50 images each month. Of these images I have two processes.
   • 1. For iPhone photos and portrait photos, I pull these into PicCollage (the paid version). Two photos = 1 print out on my Canon Selphy 1500
   • For my Canon, Leica and Sony images in landscape, I print these on my Canon Pro100.
6. Once printed, again two processes.
   • The Canon Selphy prints a postcard size image with tear-able edges. The way I format the images in PicCollage allow me to add a border to each image and the I use my paper cutter to cut the image in half and tear off the edges.
   • The Canon Pro100 prints beautiful 4×6 images ready to be put into my album.
7. Once I have all of the photos I would like to use, it’s almost serendipitous as to how it all comes together. IYKYK! Using a kit from either Ali Edwards or Studio Calico, I blend the photos with the cards. I add journaling. I add the pices from the kit. This process usually takes me a couple of weeks – a few sessions.

My goal is to complete the month as soon as the month is over. I have some years where I didn’t finish months at a time. I plan to go back and fill them in so I have a complete year. In order to do so, I ordered several old kits from Ali Edwards and will make them work. Somehow they always turn out!

Here are some shots from my albums!