Throughout my years of scrapbooking I have done more than my fair share of photo cropping. Actually, I love to crop photos. It is a great technique, but today I would like to challenge you to try to do an entire layout without any cropping.
One big advantage to not cropping your photos is that it saves a lot of time. I completed the following two-page layout in about 20 minutes. That time even included the journaling.
Notice how I used both vertical and horizontal photos. This helps break up the layout into sections, making it more pleasing to the viewer. The varied direction of the photos on the first page of the layout helps draw attention to a focal point photo by having it be the only horizontal photo on the page.
Once you have decided which photos you want to include on your “no cropping allowed” layout, I recommend putting them into two piles: the vertical photos and the horizontal photos. Separating these will help you figure out a fast and simple layout. You can place photos of the same orientation next to each other to form borders or even cover almost an entire page as I did on page two of the about Yellowstone layout.
Here is another layout where I didn’t crop any photos.
These photos had great backgrounds and I wanted to be sure to keep those details.
Not cropping any photos on your layout works best when there are not a lot of distractions in the background of your photos.
This is a fun technique that could help give a little variety to the way you usually scrapbook. This won’t work for all layouts, but give it a try, I’m sure you will like the results.