By Julie McGuffee

Scrapbooking is probably one of the most popular hobbies today. For people of all ages it is something that anyone can do. All you need is some favorite photographs and a desire to preserve those special moments of your life.

Other than making sure any product you use in your album is acid free, there really are no rules to follow. Scrapbooking is a very personal endeavor - after all, we take photographs that are meaningful only to ourselves and perhaps close family members. Scrapbook pages can be as creative or as simple as we would like them to be. There are lots of ideas in books, magazines, on the Internet and TV shows, but remember they are just ideas. The samples you see represent personal moments of the designer’s life, which they are sharing with you. Use them only as a guide to creating pages around your own photographs.

Here are some of my tips and ideas that you may find helpful:

1. When having film developed always ask for a set of duplicates. Keep one complete set together with the negatives in an acid free photo storage box and use the second set to create scrapbook pages.

2. Only use duplicates of photos in the scrapbook. If the photographs are old, make copies either using a scanner and printing copies on matte photo paper, or make copies on a Kodak Picture maker. If there is a reason you would prefer to use originals, it is recommend that you do not crop them in any way and place them on the page with photo corners instead of glue.

3. Journaling is important. Each scrapbook page should answer at least four questions: Who? What? When? and Where? You think you’ll never forget that that photograph was taken at Joey’s 5th birthday, but believe me, 25 years from now you will have your doubts. And, 75 years from now Joey will want to know which birthday he was celebrating! Titles and captions are all forms of journaling and they can be as simple or as elaborate as you would like them to be.

4. I use a loose leaf/post bound album for my completed pages. This gives me the flexibility to re-organize my pages if I need to. I create pages one at a time then decide later if they should go in our family album, a special vacation album, or one of the albums I’m putting together for each of my children.

5. Journaling through your photographs is a fun way to remember the places you visit. For example, a couple of years ago a friend and I toured southern England. While we were in Colchester I took photographs of the castle. The first photograph however was the sign, that read "Colchester Castle" and the second photo was the historical plaque that gave information about the castle itself. These photographs became an invaluable addition to the scrapbook page