Creating layouts with your photographs is definitely the point of scrapbooking. Having a scrapbook page or layout with no journaling goes against everything I teach, but sometimes it happens and sometimes a photograph speaks for itself. So how do you go about telling a story with only a photograph, and no journaling?
To begin with, think outside the normal scrapbooking box. Get creative with your layout, choose embellishments that might help to tell a story. For instance, a close up of your four year old in Hawaii could be enlarged and placed on a page all on its own. Use flowers or a lei around the photograph to tell where the photograph was taken. Make the focal point the photograph. Another clever idea is to have the person pose for the photograph. Maybe your four year old could hold up four fingers to show that she was four years old when that photo was taken. At that point, it probably doesn’t need any more journaling.
Scenery pictures, nature pictures and garden pictures are a perfect example of photographs that might not need any journaling. If you snap a photograph because you like the way it looks, it doesn’t necessarily need words.
On a page with only a photograph or photographs, you can also use a title, one word or a poem or quote to get the point across. While these in some ways are journaling, the page can be complete with or without them.
One word of advice, if you often show your layouts or albums to others, you might want to be prepared for questions about why you included a photograph in your album if you didn’t include any journaling on the page. People are naturally curious, and they will enjoy looking at the pictures with or without journaling, but they will also be filled with questions too.
Nicole Humphrey writes articles for the Scrapbooking Blog and for the Frugal Blog. She also guest blogs on a variety of topics. You can read more of her articles by clicking here.
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