As I was browsing through Amazon for a new book to read I found this quote:

You can be girly and strong
Have careers and go far
And when you get married
Not lose who you are

From the book Just Who Will You Be? by Maria Shriver.

Last year we lost the fourth of July. What do I mean by lost? We literally lost it. We left LA July 3rd, crossed the international date line, and arrived in Fiji on July 5th. The international date line happens to cross over Taveuni, a northeast island in Fiji that we visited at the end of our trip. The line only crosses land in 4 places on Earth so on Taveuni you can have one foot in yesterday and one foot in today. To reduce confusion though eastern Taveuni and the islands east of it are treated as if they were on the other side of the date line.

At the first resort we stayed at we were talking about out trip here and how we lost the 4th of July and a young British girl asked us, “But what’s the significance of the 4th of July?”

“Um, it was the day we declared our independence from your country…” I carefuly explained.

“Oh, oh yeah.”

Then we had a good laugh and explained exactly how American’s celebrate the 4th of July because she had no idea.

The British girl we met.

OK, I’m going to start updating this blog again but I’m going to turn it into my personal/art blog. I’m write about more than Blurb books because I haven’t made any since my honeymoon album. I still have a few album post I want to write and I will be making more albums in the future but I want to write more than that here. I want to post about photos I’ve altered in Photoshop and how I did it, paintings I’ve done, my quest to be a better photographer, personal experiences, and things that inspire me. This a place to collect my right brain thoughts and challenge myself to be more creative.

While I was gone my husband and I bought our first house! It’s a 1973 fixer upper that we are going to renovate ourselves. It sits on 3 acres of land with a pond, forest, and prairie. We plan to spend the majority of our lives and raise a family in this house because with all it’s flaws it’s still our dream house. You can read about our adventures on our new house blog:

3 acres and 3000 square feet

Hope you stick around!

Sorry I haven’t been around lately my husband and I have been very busy trying to buy our first house.  We finally have an accepted offer and after next week things should slow down a bit.

Anyways, the response to this blog even with it’s lack of daily posts has been amazing.  There have been over 17,000 visits since I started the blog at the end of December!  I’ve heard from a bunch of people who have had great results with their Blurb books.  I’m glad I could help.  But recently I was having trouble with the server I was using for the free template downloads.  To my surprise a kind and generous stranger from half way around the world has volunteered to host the files for me.  He said “one good deed deserves another” and I couldn’t agree more.  So thank you Michael for all your help!  You can visit his company website here if you need any web design work.

I also wanted to let you know about Wren who used my templates and tutorials to create a beautiful book about his trip to Africa.  He also has some tutorials showing how to create some page layouts in Photoshop.  You should check them out.

Thanks for all your help Michael and Wren I’m sure everyone appreciates it!

The After:

The Before:

You would never know…

While visiting a traditional Fijian village on our honeymoon I took some pictures of a boy playing with a rugby ball. Children aren’t allowed to play inside the village grounds unless it is rugby, the nation’s favorite sport. So I was taking pictures of the boy because he was bending the rules by playing with the ball by himself.

I took some pictures and forgot about them. When I came back home I was pleasantly surprised to find this picture. I love that you can clearly see the McDonalds symbol on the ball. Even on a very remote island in Fiji there are McDonalds toys!

Let me know what you think.  Have you ever taken a great photo but didn’t know it?

Many of you have asked me about how to actually put their finished templates into Blurb’s Booksmart software. So here it goes:

Step 1.) Make sure you have all of your pages saved as high resolution jpegs at 300dpi (dots per inch). If you have everything still saved as a spread (two pages side by side) you’ll have to crop them in into two pages see my post about creating actions to do this fast and efficiently. To make things faster later title your pages by their page number. Remember to include zeros in front of the page number, ie 001, so that when you sort the pages by their titles everything is in the right order.

Step 2.) Open up Booksmart and pick the size book you want to make. Leave the title and author blank if you’ve created your own cover with that information on it. Next choose photobook, the location of your page jpegs, and your theme. Or you can just click the wing it button.

Step 3.) For my book I deleted the first couple copyright and title pages because I wanted to open the book up to a picture. To use your custom pages you need to make sure you use the full bleed picture option (the completely gray box). If you created all the pages yourself you’ll need to select that template for each page. But you don’t have to create each page yourself. You can just create a few custom pages and use the provided templates for the rest. In this example I’m using all custom pages so I need to delete every page that isn’t completely gray and add a lot of the solid gray pages. To do this quickly select a bunch of the completely gray pages by holding down the Shift key while you select and then simply copy and paste.

Step 4.) Next you need to put your pages in the templates. If you don’t have the pictures already imported into Booksmart do so by clicking the Get Photos button. Then click on the sort by drop down list and sort the pictures by their title. That is why numbering the pages is so important. Finally, select the first page of your layout and click the Autoflow button. All of your pages should be put in order but you should go through and check the order and that you had enough pages for it to fill (otherwise your book with be shorter than you’d like).

Also, if you want to make your own custom covers you can add your own typeface and put it where ever you want. Note: the covers are different sizes than the inside pages. For those sizes click here. That is how I did my cover for those of you who were wondering. You need to select the cover template with the solid gray front and back and just leave the text boxes (the thin gray box) blank.

Let me know if you have any questions or if this helped you!

I learned about this amazing sculpture from the Gizmodo blog. It’s going up in Heathrow Airport in London. The 16 foot cloud consists of 4,638 dots that are controlled by 134 distribution boards and over 16,500 feet of cable.

See the sculpture in action:

You can find out more about the sculpture on Troika’s website.

Sorry I was gone for a few days. I’ve been really sick but I’ll save you the gory details.

The Eighth Annual Weblog Awards are out and as always they have some great blogs to look at. There are a couple blogs I have in my Blogroll and some that I want to add.

My favorite new site on the list is the Web Designer Wall. The blog is gorgeous and has a lot of great information. There are CSS and Photoshop tutorials and current web trends for inspiration. Check it out!

After reading the About section I realized that it is the same designer as one of my all time favorite website designs, N. Design Studio’s website. OK, well I’ve only been into web design for a year and a half but still it’s one of my favorites. Check out all the other creative sites Nick La has made.

He also runs the Best Web Gallery which is a great source for inspiration.

Right after I got my new camera (a Nikon D40) last spring a tree near my apartment was blossoming. I hadn’t even opening the owners manual. I was having trouble adjusting the flash but I really like using natural lighting. Or in this case a nearby street lamp.