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Hybrid Album: National Parks


Earlier in the spring Chris and I watched The National Parks: America's Best Idea by Ken Burns on PBS. This was around the time he planned a weekend road trip to Everglades National Park. As we were watching this documentary, I realized that this will be the second National Park located in Florida we would have visited in five months (the first being Dry Tortugas National Park back in November 2019). Being a mobile memory keeper, I don't purchase a whole lot of physical scrapbook products anymore. Honestly the only physical products I do purchase nowadays are the December Daily and Travel Collections by Ali Edwards. I have a pretty big stash of Ali's Travel products that I've never used. Creating a small, 3x8 National Parks Album would be the perfect opportunity to use some of it up (and to make room for the 2020 Travel Collection)!


This is actually a "hybrid album," meaning I used my computer (and mobile device)–in conjunction with physical products–to create this album. Here is a breakdown of how I went about making it:


Mobile Device/Apps: Any 3x8 templates you see in the album were created in Affinity Photo on my iPad Pro. I created a whole series of templates specifically for this project and just reused them throughout the album. Even the 3x4 photos with the white border is a template. All of the photos were edited in either using the editing tools in the native Photos (camera roll) or in Adobe's Mobile Lightroom using presets from Light and Airy Photography. Once I placed photos into the templates, I would export them to my camera roll. Just so you know, I use iCloud Photos to sync my photos to all of my devices. I have it set to "download and keep originals" so I have access to my high-resolution pictures at all times. This makes it easy for me to access these pictures from my desktop (iMac).


iMac Desktop: I used Adobe Photoshop and my Epson Stylus Photo R2000 printer to print my photos. The photo paper I used is Espon's Ultra Premium Photo Paper Glossy. I would place two 3x8 photos or six 3x4 photos on an 8.5x11 document in Photoshop and then print. For those 3x4 photos with the white borders, I would add a very light stroke around the photo that would act as my cut lines (I'm old school and use an x-acto knife and metal ruler to trim!). The pages that are fold-outs, were also printed on the same 8.5x11 paper, trimmed to the correct size and then scored to make the folds (again, I created templates for those fold-outs in Affinity).


Enough writing. There are photos to look at!




This fold-out is something else that you will see as part of the intro to each park.
















Another fun fold-out!







I am so happy with the way this album turned out! I wanted to get it done before Ali's 2020 Travel Collection is released (May 26) and I did it! I hope you enjoyed looking through the photos. Let me know if you have any questions about techniques or how I did things! I'd be happy to help!

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