1.      Fly your flag.

2.      Enjoy your freedom!

3.      If you have spare time, make your own home “studio” and practice taking pictures.

Because physical, one-of-a-kind keepsakes can only be passed to one person, it’s good to have a digital likeness to share with the entire family.  Physical items can also wear out, break, or fade away.  Their meaning can fade away with each generation too.  It’s best to get these treasures digitally photographed and write a little something about them so future generations will know their significance. 

Photography is literally “writing with light.” So as you can imagine, light and composition are the two major ingredients of a good picture.  Since we are trying to pass a 3D item on in 2D we need to photograph it in a sharp, clear, defining manor.  You can still take beautiful, artistic pictures of it too but be sure to get the essence of the piece.  The difference is like Shakespeare vs. a technical manual. 

The pictures above show some lead crystal passed down to me from my great-great grandmother.  One is taken in its place in my home.  I used a large aperture to narrow the field of focus to just the front part of the larger piece.  It sits on a doily that the original owner’s daughter made.  The background is natural but too busy for archiving.  The other was taken in my “studio.”  No background, aperture tighter, and shutter open longer.  The only thing that could have made it more utilitarian is if I had placed a ruler in the front of it to get a sense of true size.  The background is actually a white roller-type shade that I attached to the wall using 3M temporary mounting strips.  I draped the shade over a table so I would not have any background at all.  I used the same natural lighting and I used a tripod for both compositions.  

Both depict the crystal and both require a statement of significance for the viewer to understand what it is, but the artistic version is a little busy and takes away the detail of the pieces.  Which is correct?  Whichever you like best!  If you are going to use a picture of an item in a video, a military uniform, for example, you may want to take the picture with a very non-descript background so you can “frame” it with a battleground or picture of the soldier wearing the uniform.

There are things in many families that cannot be simply scanned.  Yes, can use your Flip-Pal to scan medals, coins, quilts, portraits, paintings and photos of any size or condition.  But what about the odd things you have found that you would like to preserve and may use in your family history video? 

In our family, we have trophies from an uncle that competed in horse competitions with his prized Clydesdales, my mother’s wedding dress was made by her seamstress mother (my grandmother), her mother (my great grandmother) was a Harvey Girl and I inherited one of her aprons, her mother (my great-great-grandmother) passed down some beautiful crystal, and my husband inherited his grandfather’s pistol from the civil war.

Taking pictures of those items is what we’ll be talking about this week so think about what you’ve got that you need to capture with your camera and choose one or two of those items to work with.