The Thanksgiving holiday is a popular time of the year to take photos. Whether you take a single photo of your beautiful turkey, photos of your family, or photos of all the family favorite dishes, digital scrapbookers are sure to preserve Thanksgiving memories by taking lots of photos.
To help you capture some of your best Thanksgiving memories this year, I’ve put together my list of the top 5 tips for preserving Thanksgiving memories:
- No flash for food: If you don’t follow a single other tip, the one you want to make sure you follow is to not use a flash when photographing food. Your camera’s flash will wash out your photo and won’t allow the true colors and beauty of your food to show. It can create a combo of bright hot spots and dark shadows, leaving your Thanksgiving feast looking unappetizing. Turn off the flash and place food near natural light, like a window, if possible. If natural light isn’t possible, your lighting in the kitchen is still likely to be better than using the flash. Take the time to learn more about using light in your digital photography before turkey day arrives.
- Take lots of Thanksgiving digital photographs: Don’t trust that one shot of your roasted turkey is enough. Preserve memories by taking several photos of your Thanksgiving recipes. Take a photo of Grandma’s mashed potatoes one way and then shoot it from another angle. This way, when you sit down to scrapbook your Thanksgiving photos, you can look through all your photos and choose the ones that look the best. Take a photo of your Thanksgiving dishes in it’s pan, but also consider a photo of it on served on a dinner plate. You might be surprised to find that your first shot isn’t the one you use, but rather one of the others.
- Photograph your favorite dishes being prepared: While a photo of the finished side dishes and desserts is expected, why not take a few photos of the steps that it takes to get to that point? You don’t need many, but 1-2 photos of the food prep will help you to tell a story in digital scrapbook layouts. If you want to create a digital scrapbooking recipe album, you may want to take multiple shots of the progress, so future generations can have a visual of how the dish is prepared.
- Turn off your camera “sounds”: While every family has those who love their photo taken, there is usually family members who are a bit camera-shy. Sometimes it helps to turn off your audible camera sounds, so you can snap lots of candid Thanksgiving photos, without disturbing the activity taking place. It helps the photos to look more natural and everyone in the photo can be captured looking more at ease.
- Keep it simple: If you find taking Thanksgiving dinner photos to be a bit stressful, and help is as a minimum for you, keep it simple. I give you permission to ignore all my tips. But if you are able to do one thing, I challenge you create a single Thanksgiving scrapbook layout. It doesn’t have to be fancy, just choose some Thanksgiving digital scrapbooking products that you like and create a layout with details about the holiday. Don’t have time to take photos? That’s okay too. Scrapbooking your Thanksgiving memories with journaling only (no photos) is perfectly wonderful.