First up is the Photo Collage. I find this is a good way to use potentially a large number of photos where none of them is great but as a collection they capture an event of idea. It could be a holiday, a person, a feeling - it is very versatile.
This isn't a new layout but it is one I wanted to share on here. I taught this at a retreat in 2009 and I was inspired to do it when I was sorting through an old box of stuff I had saved from my teenage years.
My friends and I used to enjoy making a photo collage using pictures of each other and places we had been. A couple of months before I started making this Elizabeth, my cousin and, at the time, our lodger asked me to help her make a photo collage of her holiday the previous summer. We spread out loads of photos on the floor and played about chopping them up, cutting people out of them and creating a collage. It was about then that I remembered how much fun it was and decided to do a layout using the same technique.
The photos in my layout are a mixture of pictures of our old house and our new house and I also cut out photos of Darren and the girls (I am on there but only a tiny pic of me in front of our old front door!)
When using this technique I find that cutting out some people or images allows you to cover the straight edge joins between some of the photos giving a more fluid effect with photos linking into each other rather than having abrupt lines where they meet. For this layout I changed them all to black and white as I wanted it to be quite a cohesive background although sometimes a riot of colour is fun!