Photo Finish

Digital cameras. Great for sharing photos, great for instant gratification and great that each ‘click’ of the shutter doesn’t have to cost you fifty cents.

Dealing with thousands of photo files? Not so great.

Those of us who grew up with shoe boxes bulging with undated Polaroids thought the digital life would do all our organizing for us. Our time would be freed up for other tasks (or maybe for reading in the bathtub). But just as the computer age has yet to give us a paperless office, the digital image revolution hasn’t resulted in fuss-free photo management.

We now have thousands of photos sitting in the digital shoe box (aka our hard drive) to sort through instead of dozens. And none of them will be enjoyed unless we pick out the best and share them around.

But we know where you can get help. MonkeyRed Designs is a service that reviews your photos, picks out the cream of the crop, and uses them to tell a story. It sounds like a tall order, but dad entrepreneur Greg Thorpe (and savvy dad to Harry, 2) is up to the task. As a former TV producer and journalist, he has a long history of finding a narrative focus amongst the masses of material he was often given to work with. And it’s actually easier for an outsider to find the storyline in a family event, not being so so close to it.

MonkeyRed Designs will take your images and—with your approval at every step—turn out a photo book or calendar that will provide memories for decades to come (the kind that no computer crash can erase). Another of their popular products is the Life Poster, which combines dozens of images of a particular person or event into a piece of frameable wall art.

As you round up your summer adventuring, Greg offers up the following tips that he’s learned from perusing other folks’ family photos:

• Don’t forget to get an ‘establishing shot’ of the setting, whether it’s the church exterior just before the bride arrives, or the tents on the lawn for the commencement ceremony.
• Zoom in for your close-ups. Don’t forget to snap lots of candid shots, which often tell the story better than the posed photos.
• Back up! (Not you, your photos.) Whether you are storing to CD, DVD or an external hard drive, it’s critical. Yes, the unthinkable CAN happen. Look into software programs that back up your files automatically.

Summer is a wonderful time to make memories. But if preserving them is turning into an overwhelming task, don’t get the photo blues—call Monkey Red.

MonkeyRed Designs
www.monkeyred.com
(778) 338 3622

Comments