Last week my beautiful baby boy reached the eight month mark. I can’t believe how fast time has flown since his arrival. I have taken thousands and thousands of pictures since his birth. In the first few weeks I snapped shots every day. As the weeks went on I started pulling out the camera at least three times and more recently I pared down my photography sessions to roughly two times a week.
Luckily my husband and I are super organized folks. Every few days my husband edits the photographs I take. He searches through hundreds of photos and pares down to only the best shots. While we start with roughly one to two hundred we ultimately end up with the best fifteen to thirty for that day.
He categorizes them by date and event and stores backups so we won’t ever lose them. We post the photos online so friends and family can see them, but I wanted to further pare down the photos and create an album of the first eight months of our little guy’s life.
Even with all of our organization it still took me a couple of days to search out and select the very best shots. I narrowed it down to roughly 149 photos in the first four months and 279 for months 5 through 8.
There are nearly twice as many photos in the second four months because I never picked up a camera before my son was born and in the past eight months my shot selection has greatly improved. Plus, as my son becomes more active the photographs have become interesting. In those first couple of months most of the photos are taken with my son laying down.
I had two Groupons to Photobook America that were set to expire on the day my son turned eight months, so I decided to separate out the photos into two albums. The first months 1 – 4 the second months 5 – 8.
It made me so happy to look through all of the photographs and remember each of those precious moments with him. Unfortunately, I realized that I didn’t include all of the photos I intended to in the first book. I copied the images over to a directory and it seems they were moved to a sub-directory without my realizing. After looking at so many pictures I simply didn’t realize they were missing until it was too late.
That’s a bummer because some of the early images in the hospital won’t be included in the book. Along with a particularly adorable set of photos that were taken just before Christmas time.
I learned two valuable lessons in all of this. First, if I intend to make another album, (which I do), then I need to select favorites every month. It took days to select all of the pictures I wanted and it will be much faster to complete this process as soon as my husband edits them rather than trying to take on this task all at once.
Second I should not wait until the last minute to take on a task like this. I literally waited until the very day my Groupon was set to expire to complete the album. This was due in part to the fact that I was sick a week up to the expiration date, but in my rushed state I missed photographs I wanted to include. Had I provided more time for myself I could’ve created the album then taken a day or two to review it and make certain that it was just the way I wanted it to be.
Of course, we have those photographs in other places, but it’s a bummer to work so hard on something and then feel it’s slightly less than I wanted it to be.
I can’t wait for the photo albums to arrive. I purchased them from Photobook America and the vouchers cost only $35 for $115 worth of photo keepsake books.
I don’t want to plug Photobook America until I see the results, but I will say that I was very impressed with their software. I was able to perform a lot of cropping and editing within the layout screens.
I’ll provide an update once the photo albums arrive. After all this work I sure hope they look amazing!
If you’re interested in purchasing a Groupon to Photobook America click the image below, sign up and search for deals in Cincinatti. There are only a few hours left to purchase, so if you’re interested you should hurry. I just purchased another Groupon so I can create one last photo album, (months 9 – 12), of my son’s first year!