Make it Focal - Part 1 - The Photo Itself

What makes a great layout?  Sometimes it seems easiest to just play around with pictures and papers and embellishments until we get something that we find we like.  I've found, however, that it often helps my layouts and increases the speed with which I can create them when I think about layouts in a more structured way.

When it comes to creating a great scrapbook layout, I would say that the most important thing I've learned is to make sure that I have a photo that is clearly the focal point of my page.  Your eye needs to know where to rest! I've learned that when I have trouble with a layout, I need to ask myself, "What's your focal point?"  Often I discover that my layout isn't working because two photos are vying for supremacy and I need to help one clearly stand out.  Because this is so important, I'll take the next several weeks to talk about different ways to help make a particular photo stand out as the focal point on a page. The the focus is on scrapbook focals, but you'll see that the concepts can easily be adapted to cards as well.

Today I'll talk about the photo itself.  Consider this layout:

I had real trouble with this layout to start with, and one of the biggest problems was the photo I was using.  Here is the original photo:

There were a couple of problems with this picture as focal.  For one thing, the size of the subject's face was smaller than that in at least one of the other pictures on the page, causing a bit of conflict between the two pictures for most important status.  Also, there is quite a bit of background showing in the picture.  You'll notice that in the final layout, I zoomed in quite a bit on the subject, cropping out some of the distracting background.  Sometimes it works to just crop the picture.  In this particular case, that would have added to the problem by making the picture itself smaller than the other pictures, creating more focal confusion.  So, in this case, I chose to digitally crop the picture and then re-print it. This allowed me to have a picture that was as large as the other photos with the person's face clearly larger than the faces in the other photos.

There are several other things that I did to help the focal photo stand out better, but those are discussions for another time.  What ones do you see?