Photo Tip: Look Up!


Featuring Diamond Die 3×3

Photo Tip: Look Up!

What do you see when you lift your eyes above your subject or main focus?

Edinburgh for the Records
Mosaic Moments Photo Tips: Look Up!

Mosaic Moments Photo Tips: Look Up! Some inspirational ideas

So far in our Photo Tips feature we’ve encouraged you to Get Close and Personal then, To Take the Long Shot in your photo habits, today, let me suggest that you Look Up!

We are good at seeing what’s right in front of us, but have you stopped to think about what’s up just above you? What do we miss that might be of interest and add to your story?

Is it words carved on the face of the building?

 

Mosaic Moments Photo Tips: Look Up! Some inspirational ideas: Words carved on buildings

A stone with the date the building was built?

 

Mosaic Moments Photo Tips: Look Up!

Mosaic Moments Photo Tips: Look Up! Some inspirational ideas: Dates carved in stone tell when and who about the building

Is it a wrought iron decorative piece on a castle…

 

Mosaic Moments Photo Tips: Look Up!

Mosaic Moments Photo Tips: Look Up! Some inspirational ideas: Wrought iron details on a castle

…or a basket hanging from what used to be a fancy conduit for a gas street lamp that you just might have overlooked?

 

Mosaic Moments Photo Tips: Look Up!

Mosaic Moments Photo Tips: Look Up! Some inspirational ideas: Old Gas Lamps being reused

I hope you will be able to start thinking of your surroundings when you are taking your photos. I think this will help you to create better layouts and fill your scrapbooks with interesting and memorable details. If you practice in your day to day photos then, when you take trips you will have trained yourself to look beyond the end of your nose and find exciting details! It’s so easy to focus in on what’s right before you we need to practice each of these tips before it comes naturally. I’m not talking becoming professional, just proficient.

 

Mosaic Moments Photo Tips: Look Up!

Mosaic Moments Photo Tips: Look Up! Some inspirational ideas Layout

Join me as I take a walk, well more like a mad dash, looking up through this wonderful building in Edinburgh, Scotland.

THE PATTERN

My layout used Pattern #316, a puzzle pattern. It has 3 spots that I could use my featured die, the Diamond Die 3×3. The pattern accommodates eight good sized photos and eight 1” tiles. I’ve used a 12×12 Mosaic Moments Deep Spring Green Grid Paper on which to build my layout.

 

Pattern #316

Mosaic Moments Pattern #316 Puzzle Pattern

THE DIE

Mosaic Moments The Diamond Die 3×3

Personally, I love the various shaped dies like this Diamond Die 3×3 for creating color patterns in a layout and framing journaling blocks. This time it will be a journal block, but only in the center section; I have used another photo to fill the outside triangles that includes both the books and the ceiling featured in the other spots.

THE EMBELLISHMENTS
You will notice that the 1” dies (Robins Egg Blue) have been embossed. For this scrapbook page, plain tiles were just not cutting it. Finding just the right pattern took a little playing around. I settled on an Anna Griffith/Cuttlebug embossing strip called Empire Arch…seemed appropriate.

 

Mosaic Moments Photo Tips: Look Up! S

Mosaic Moments Photo Tips: Look Up! The Diamond Die 3×3 for journaling

I used the embossing folder two ways on the tiles, first in an overlapping pattern as shown here and second as a single arch in each tile.

TIP:

To get just what I want I used a bit of dot adhesive to the back of the tile as I placed exactly where it needed to be on the strip pattern and then embossed. Lift it up gently or you may find it tearing.

 

Mosaic Moments Photo Tips

Mosaic Moments Photo Tips: Look Up! Embossing folder to add texture to your tiles

THE STORY
I had a long list of places to visit in Edinburgh and my cousins decided it would be great for me to do it all in one day. Actually, it was more like under two hours. From the time Mum and I got off the train in Waverly Station till lunch at Jenner’s, my cousin Bob took me on a walking tour of most of my spots to see, while Mum and my cousin Wilma went shopping.

Bob is a retired police officer and this had been his beat at one time. I’m a kind of stop and smell the roses and take a dozen pictures type person and he’s let’s get this checked off my list type of guy. This left me running through the streets and hills to catch up with him most of the morning.

Our final stop following lunch was the General Records House, home to all the national records, census, marriage, birth, death, yes, the whole thing! For years, I’d been delving into these records online through ScotlandsPeople.com and I was thrilled for this visit…or should I say…zip…through the series of buildings.

Like many buildings in Edinburgh it’s pretty impressive. The architectural details alone are a must see, but this building is also graced with a monument to The Duke of Wellington. I had to include it here with an additional few more candid photos that included Mum and cousin Wilma. So I’ve got both outside and inside photos.

TIP: TAGGING
I used narrow strips of cardstock that matched my mats to include the names, building and statue titles directly to the photos. Because I had a good amount of open space on the photo placing it on them directly did not take away from the picture. You might want to try tagging the next time you want to include a detail without a whole paragraph of info.

 

Mosaic Moments Photo Tips: Look Up! Some inspirational ideas

Mosaic Moments Photo Tips: Look Up! Some inspirational ideas: Tagging your photos to include details

The place was a buzz with lots of activity at various desks on the floor, but it was looking up that took my breathe away! Oh, my, what a sight of shelves packed tight with volumes and volumes of historic documents! As my eyes continued to follow the floors and floors upward the beauty of the artistic ceilings left me speechless. Out came the camera and the bustle on the lower levels were forgotten as I snapped pictures of what lay above!

The two domed rooms were distinctively different in contents and ceilings and I may have missed that in my eagerness to take in all the genealogical resources at my fingertips below. Then again…Bob was off and I had to run once again. Maybe another time.

Wondering what you may have missed? What might you find if you look up? Here are a few things that caught my eye as I looked up. Have fun on your adventure!

 

Mosaic Moments Photo Tips

Mosaic Moments Photo Tips: Look Up! Some more inspirational ideas to include next time!

Andrea Fisher