Making Choices About Your Photos (1)

I must confess that over the last few weeks I have struggled to find enough time to scrap and so as a result when I was trying to come up with something to write for tonights blog post I had a look back through some of my layouts from earlier in the year to see if i could find something to put up that I hadn't blogged before.

I came across this layout from the January 2010 Design Team Gallery featuring Prima papers. I was really pleased with this layout - with it i managed to try out a clean and simple design style but allow the paper to offer the detail and embellishment that I find hard to leave out when i attempt clean and simple.

The paper has the fancy frame round the edge and my page just adds the three elements; photo, journaling and title, to the centre of the frame.

However another reason I love this layout is I find the combination of the colour in the page and the black and white photo very easy on the eye. I have always loved the simple and timeless style of black and white photos and when I look at my scrapping I notice that I tend to choose black and white for specific sorts of layouts. Often (though not always) I reach for the black and whites for those layouts focusing on relationships, character etc... where as colour seems to be first choice for documenting events.

One of the big joys of black and white photo graphs is that it really opens up your options for which papers to work with. Sometimes the colour in your photo just screams a paper line at you and that is great, but if it doesn't then it is always worth converting the photo to black and white and you may find that removing the colour element opens up whole new avenues and ideas.

So what do you prefer to work with and why? Black & White, Colour, Sepia or a combination of all of them?