Keeping up with all your tech and gear can feel like drinking from a firehose. If you don’t pay attention to the constant changes, upgrades and advances, you can wake up feeling like a Luddite.
I just reviewed a bit of what I’ve discovered over the past year and then shared on my blog.
And here are ten ways I’ve learned how to skill up. (Each title below is linked to my original blog post.)
Before framing a collage of family history photos for your walls, there are several important factors to first consider. Here’s what I learned.
I usually show off family photos at home through my digital screens. (I haven’t bought photo paper in years.) The pictures glow on my little Nixplay digital frames and on my family room screen via my Apple TV interface. For years, I’ve enjoyed the flexibility to rotate countless images through these little memory portals.
What I’ve mostly ignored is the art of analog photo framing where you make a print, place it in a wooden frame and hang it on your wall. That’s so 1925. Plus, you ruin your walls in the process with all those little nail holes.
Well, unless you want to live in a sterile environment with empty walls, you have to accept some damage across the years and include a little patch and paint planning for your home.
So, I recently embarked on a journey to return to this old-school approach and frame more photos to hang.
My goal was to create a memory wall/family history gallery featuring photos from past generations in our hallway.
The Best Archival Photos have Visual Markers I turned to the collection of pictures from my parents’ old photo albums, many of which I had already digitized. So, I was off to a great start, but I was quickly disappointed with what I found.
Sure, my parents took family photos, but a lot of them simply weren’t that great. Those Kodak moments were turned into soft, mediocre images captured by inferior 20th century consumer tech. (I’m admittedly spoiled by today’s smartphone photography magic.)
More importantly, so many of these images couldn’t stand on their own and reflect a story. The backgrounds were simply too vague.
Going back a generation to my grandparents, I had fewer pictures to work with. That said, I could tell my paternal grandmother really enjoyed being photographed.
I have just a couple of pictures of my great grandparents, and that’s it.
Other Factors to Consider Once you select the best photos to work with, then you’ve got to figure out how they should go together. And that can be much harder than you’d think.
How you position archival family pictures can totally affect the story you want to tell. This is an entirely different skill set than I’m used to. (Remember, I just rotate pictures in digital frames.)
Plus, I was overwhelmed by the challenge to properly position a collage of photo frames on my wall and make it look organized and well designed (as opposed to a mess).
And then finally, the idea of puncturing my wall with lots of little nails almost pushed me over the edge towards inaction.
Display a Story in Groups of Four Photos To help reduce my stress and solve for these complexities, I decided to make my photo frames do more of the work. I purchased wall-mountable frames that housed four 5″ x 7” photos each. (I picked up a few 25” x 10” frames from Target.)
This strategy reduced my clutter concerns by 75% right there.
And it also created a structure for how I would organize my photos. Each group of four pictures needed to represent its own story.
Suddenly, my project became much easier.
One group showcased portraits of three generations on my father’s side as well as my maternal grandparents.
Another group featured my parents over the years.
Easy, right?
The only functional limitation to this design was I needed to group photos by orientation: portrait or landscape.
Still, I was able to make it work.
A Photo Collection Reflects a Larger Family Narrative I’m happy to report the grand opening of Barrett’s family history gallery (7am-6pm weekdays and 9am-1pm on weekends).
But seriously, it feels great to have a few photos on our wall that display my family’s story. Previously, I’ve had some of these individually framed on shelves throughout our house. But they were effectively hidden from daily view.
Plus, I like that our son can see this new collection. He knew my dad (who passed in 2022), but he never met my mom.
Yes, there’s more work to do… There’s a whole other family history to reflect on our walls. That comes next.
Simple and Effective Design How ironic. What’s old is new again. So obvious… yet still requiring me to (re)discover these mini ‘aha’ moments.
Until the day comes when I upgrade my hallway to wall-to-wall digital screens, relying on old-school frames with four photos each is my DIY photo gallery solution.
These sunset and sunrise photos I snapped remind me of some great vacation moments my family and I have spent together. That’s why they are strong contenders to frame and hang at home. (Disclaimer: This living room is AI generated via Google Whisk. But the photos in the AI frames are all mine.) Here’s why the stories behind your pictures are often more important than the photos themselves.
I studied the framed European vacation photo hanging on the living room wall as I listened to the story behind it. It was a wonderful picture, but the narrative was even better.
My wife and I were visiting friends recently, and they were sharing their vacation experiences through the framed pictures in their home. I was hooked.
These photos displayed simple moments from their trips. Some featured public activity, but none showed the members of this family. The images were entirely anonymous, but still extremely personal. The key factor was the collection of rich personal stories that accompanied these photos. That’s what brought them to life.
From Snapshots to Stories: Rethinking Your Wall Art The next day, my wife suggested that we might consider putting up a few more of our own travel photos in our home. She said that I had taken so many great pictures from our trips over the years. Why not pick several more to frame and hang? I agreed.
I said I would review our vacation photos and create a collection for us to choose from. And I did. But I was shocked by what I discovered.
You’re Actually Framing Stories I found that most of our vacation photos I’ve been taking over the years weren’t going to work. That’s because they fell into two categories.
These pictures either featured me and my family.
Or they were my attempts at iconic shots from these cities (like you might find on a postcard).
Mostly missing was any location imagery that carried a story behind the moment.
As I looked at my pictures, the stories simply weren’t flowing.
Family Vacation Photos Can Quickly Get Dated Sure, it’s easy to frame vacation photos with family in the shot. Of course, that tethers you to the point in time and location. And yes, I’ve already positioned some of those shots on our walls. But there’s a problem with this strategy.
Your kids grow up quick. So, if your photo is more than a couple years old, it’s going to feel dated. Maybe two or three older pictures on your walls are okay. But I don’t want my house to be a museum focused on a different era. Plus, I don’t think my teenage son appreciates seeing lots of photos showing him half his size. (That’s such an uncool dad thing to do!)
It’s the Memory that Matters Most So, if you want to hang up photos from your trips, you’d better take some shots that can stand on their own and contain a story that you’ll remember. (Otherwise, it’s little more than a postcard that simply says you were there.)
This is how the right photo can reflect real meaning for you in future years and help project the story of your life.
This may all seem obvious, but it’s often hard to accomplish.
Conversely, sometimes, these photo opportunities just appear, and you quickly snap the picture without much thought. And then you may not realize that you’ve captured a memorable moment until you get back from your trip and reflect on that photo.
However it happens, these are the special photos to curate. They don’t have to be your ‘best’ photos. But they’re the ones that will carry the most meaning for you across time.
And I think these are the ones to consider showcasing… for yourself and others.
Focus on Snapping Good Photos that Tell a Better Story As for our own photo-framing project, happily, I did find enough photos to choose from that will work.
But this exercise was a critical reminder for me that most anyone today can take a good photo with their phone.
But being a better photographer is always about capturing a memorable story.
At Home with Tech 