Digital Photography is to Scrapbooking as Peanut Butter is to Jelly

If ever two hobbies were made for each other, its digital photography and scrapbooking.

In case you haven't discovered this wonderful hobby yet, scrapbooking has no similarity to the scrapbooks you made in school .. how many years ago?

Today's scrapbookers, often called scrapartists, create beautiful memory albums using photographs and other memorabilia, card stock, paper, journaling and special embellishments. Digital scrapbooking, an exciting new trend in the scrapbooking world, involves creating the entire layout digitally and printing onto appropriate paper.

Whether you do traditional scrapbooking or you're trying your hand at digital scrapbooking, you'll find so many fun things to do with your digital photographs.

Let's start with the pictures themselves. First of all, since you're not paying for film or development, you can take tons of digital photographs. You can experiment with different camera settings and get different effects. You'll have so many picture choices when you start to plan your layouts. No more trying to make a less than thrilling photograph work with your beautiful layout design.

Even more exciting, because you're working with digital files, you work with copies and never risk damaging the originals.

Secondly, with digital photography and good digital photo editing software, you can resize, crop, improve the color, create special effects, combine photos together to form a collage, remove blemishes from your subject's skin, tidy up stray strands of hair, make subjects appear slimmer and so much more.

You can convert color photographs to elegant black and white, or you can convert your digital photography to any number of monochrome color tones. You can convert your images to match any color paper, card stock or embellishments you plan on using.

You can resize your pictures so they fit any size layout you have in mind. You can reshape them to print into any number of shapes, including stars, circles, ovals, rectangles, squares, or even freeform shapes. You can even make giant alphabets and insert your pictures into the letters, arranging so the key components are visible within the letter.

You can add digital frames and blocks, using the exact colors that appear in the picture. If you wish, you can fill your frames with a repeating portion of the image. For example, highlight your garden picture with a frame containing a pattern created from the golden sunflowers growing in the flower bed.

If you want to take artistic license, you can duplicate any portion of an image. For example, suppose your seacape shows a sailboat in the foreground. With digital image editing software, you can make a second, third, fourth (or unlimited number) of identical sailboats elsewhere in the water.

When you blend digital photography with scrapbooking, you can manipulate your images to work with any scrapbook style you're using -- shabby chic, distressed, modern, heritage - anything you want.

As I said earlier, digital scrapbooking and digital photography make a natural fit.

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