Birth announcements are the perfect kind of greetings to send out to family and friends announcing the wonderful inception of your child into the world. Let the card reflect the character and personality you hope your baby will have. It can be somber, serious, and smart or spunky, fun, and energetic. Birth announcement cards are great because they let you splash in your own chosen colors and adorning floral or distinctive pattern with a photo of your newborn. Your little one deserves a grand inception, a superb entrance, a big splash into this wonderful world. A birth announcement is the best way to pronounce your child’s birth.

Birth announcements, for those that aren’t quite in the know, are little cards you send out to friends and family announcing the successful birth of your newborn. They should be sent out to all the mothers’ bridal shower and wedding party friends because it’s confirmation of a success. They’re especially good if you have a massive amount of contacts, and you don’t feel like alerting them all to your baby’s details and birth time, etc.
Birth announcements are super great because they allow you to encapsulate the basic details of a standard birth like birth weight, name, time of birth, day, date, and not much more. The key to the cards’ charm is their simplicity and elegance of presentation. It’s almost like getting a little nudge or wink. It just alerts you to the fact of a successful birth. A wonderful black and white, or color, photo of the newborn just after birth is customary. The majority of the birth announcement cards come in discounted bulk packs because most people have at least 25 colleagues or friends they want to alert. It’s a proud moment in a parent’s life to introduce their baby into the world - formally (not physically). Many parents keep at least one copy of the card for a scrap book and one to give to the adult-version of the baby once it’s all grown up and can appreciate the card for its sentimental value. It’s like a stylized baby picture with meaning, and more parents should utilize the internet to craft customized birth announcements in a few minutes’ time. It’s not that labor-intensive and your baby really deserves a special proclamation of its beautiful existence and the moment when it arrived here.

Birth announcements should be in postcard format and designed for simplicity. They should be minimalist, dainty, and sweet. They’re the easiest way to introduce your friends to your new ****.

Sharing photos with your family and friends through online photo sharing brings a whole new dimension to your favorite pictures. Thanks to digital cameras and scanners, and of course the Internet, it’s never been easier to share entire albums worth of pictures with just about anyone, from your siblings to your co-workers. If you’re planning to take the time to share your photos online, you should spend a little effort to really make your online album stand out.
Sorting and Organizing

The first step in making your online photo album properly presentable is simply to organize and screen your photos. Most common software packages used for storing and editing photos, such as the software included with many digital cameras, make sorting through and organizing your photos a snap. It’s important to remember that just because you took a picture doesn’t necessarily mean its worth sharing with the world.

While you really want to focus on getting your favorite memories in there, its important not to go overboard. Not only can you save space on your hard drive and/or your online photo sharing account, but those who are viewing your album are sure to appreciate the effort. No one is going to enjoy sharing your memories if they feel like they’re looking at the same picture again and again, or if the pictures are blurry or otherwise poorly taken.

Editing Your Photos

Editing the photos in your album is a great way to really make them stand out. However, before you start doing any editing, you should take a few moments and back up all of your original pictures. While the goal of editing pictures is to make them look better, if you’re still a novice at photo editing you might end up making them look worse. Backing up the original images will let you start over if you make mistakes that ruin, instead of enhance, the picture.

Even if you know you way around your editing software, it pays to have backups. Sometimes, a couple hours or a couple days after making a change, you realize that it just doesn’t sit right with you. Having a backup ensures you can take another pass at it.

Once you’re ready to edit your photo, you should start with the basics. First, you should make sure that the orientation of the photo is correct. Looking through a photo album, even an online one, will get tiring if the viewer constantly has to tilt their head to the side to properly view a picture. Take a few seconds and use the rotate tool, which should be easily found in most common editing software. That will get your pictures oriented in the right direction for easy viewing.

Once that’s finished, you can move on to more advanced editing techniques, everything from cropping to removing red-eye to altering the lighting of the picture. Fortunately, most photo editing software is extremely versatile and user friendly, so making most of these modifications is quick and painless. With a little practice, you’ll be producing wonderful and memorable photo albums in no time.

There are quite a few photo sharing sites on the Internet these days. But just because some have millions of users, does that make them ideal for easy photo sharing?

It depends on what you want to do. If you want to show your photos to the whole world, then a site that touts open sharing is right for you. However, if you consider your photos to be private between you and your family and friends, then you’ll want to look for a site that is built for easy photo sharing, but allows you to easily restrict who can and cannot see your photos.

Easy photo sharing is more than just transferring or scanning your photos into your computer and uploading them to a sharing site. There are lots of sites that allow you to do that. The thing you need to watch out for is what happens to your photos once they’re on the photo sharing website, and does the site really feature easy photo sharing.

A brief history of easy photo sharing

The very early easy photo sharing sites appeared in the mid to late 1990s, but were mostly created to provide online print ordering. More appeared in the early part of this century, primarily to provide centralized access to photos.

At the same time, desktop photo management systems appeared. These were not Internet based, and still aren’t. They provide a way to manage photos on your computer, and sometimes have links to online storage sites.

A true easy photo sharing site will allow you to easily share your photos across the Internet with the people of your choice. Exposing all your photos for the entire world to see is not really sharing - it’s really more like a neighborhood open house for your photos and lacks the intimacy of sending a photo to a friend or relative.

Getting your photos onto an easy photo sharing site

Of course, photo sharing starts with a camera. Whether it’s a camera phone or a high-end digital Single Lens Reflex camera, you need to take the picture before you can share the picture. You may have some older prints around the house that you’d like to digitize and save to an easy photo sharing site.

With that in mind, a true easy photo sharing site will feature easy one step scanning and whole folder uploads.

With one step scanning, all you do is place your photo on your scanner and push a button. With whole folder uploads, you can upload hundreds of photos all at once, rather than browsing them in one at a time. With these two features, you can get the photos you want online as fast as possible, so you can start sharing them with the people you care about.

Free membership or paid subscription?

Many easy photo sharing sites require membership. But some will allow you to upload as many as 500 photos free, no membership required. If you have a digital camera, you likely already know that you will reach the upper limits of any free membership very quickly.

Some sites also put a limit on the maximum size of the photos you can upload. This is very inconvenient as the upload process will be stopped or paused as photos that are too large are kicked out of the process. Sites that put limits on the size of individual photos cannot be referred to as easy photo sharing sites.

Easy photo sharing means more than just sending an email

Sites that offer printing services are also convenient. Most do, and many offer roughly the same price and quality, so pay particular attention to how easy it is to order the prints, how easy it is to upload your photos, customer service, shipping options, etc. How well a site handles these services is an indication of whether or not it is an easy photo sharing site.

Also, true easy photo sharing sites will allow you to create, print and share photo albums, story books, greeting cards, calendars, and other photo gifts. These items should be easy to create, and feature high quality, both in terms of service and the finished product you receive.

It seems like everybody is sharing photos online. But it also seems as if it’s less about sharing memories, and more about sharing a funny photo they found on the Internet, or just putting a bunch of photos from a vacation into a file folder for people to view.

That’s a little like dropping an envelope of prints on someone’s desk and expecting them to understand what’s going on in the pictures. If the person wasn’t with you when the photos were taken, they’ll have no idea what they’re looking at.

When you share your photos, be sure to include a story about them. Some sites allow for easy storytelling, some don’t. Search “easy photo sharing” on the Internet, and you’ll find sites that let you tell stories quickly and easily.

Below are some tips you can use to make your photo sharing a little more meaningful for family and friends. These are ideas you can use to bring the photos you share to life for the people you send them to.

Share memories from your life. This is especially important as parents age and kids grow up. Both are important times filled with milestones you’ll want to remember. Without a doubt, there will be people in your circle of friends who will want to see pictures of your mom, dad, or relatives whom you have a significant relationship with. People love stories about people, especially when they have deep meaning.

Share your passions. If you’ve got a hobby, child, husband or something else you’re particularly proud of, be sure to catch a special moment with a photo and then share it.

For example, if you’re husband’s a woodworker, be sure to capture shots of him working on a project, then get a picture of him with his finished project and show it off! You can document the project start to finish in photos, and then add just a little bit of text to each one.

Share a wonderful moment. With digital photography, it’s so easy to snap a quick picture and send it off in an email. So if your dog does something cute, or if you child does something even cuter, capture the moment and send it off to grandma, a favorite aunt, a friend … whoever you think would love to share the moment with you. This is a really fun thing to do. It engages your friends and family in your every day life, and is a great way to stay connected.

Share a day, a month or even a whole year. Easy photo sharing sites make it easy for you to organize your photos so that you can share magical memories from a day, or the events and milestones from an entire year. That’s the beauty of online photo sharing - you can catch people up with your life in an instant!

Plus, you don’t have to wait for a special occasion to do so. People love to hear about what’s going on in your life, so don’t be shy. If you have a particular milestone or event you want to share, or a series of events you want to catch people up on, go ahead and share!

Share memories across the years. This is perhaps the greatest untapped part of online photo sharing. Just think of all those old photos you have sitting in a box or in photo albums. Why not break them out, scan them into your computer and start sharing them with the people in your life in a new and exciting way.

That’s right, in this modern digital age, you can connect with the past faster and in ways you never dreamed possible. Imagine reaching out to an aunt you haven’t seen in decades with pictures from the summer days you spent with her.

Think of the joy your loved one will feel when they receive photos from days gone by. And you can share this joy with a simple email or you can lovingly create a Photo Album or other printed Keepsake and send it directly to the person you’re reaching out to.

There are a lot of different ways you can share photos, but the key is to add enough information so the recipient of the photo will know the story behind the photo - and everybody love’s a good story!

Wedding Photography

Digital has taken Wedding Photography to a whole new level. No longer does the bride and groom wait for weeks to get their prized memories back for review, they are ready upon their return from the honeymoon … some ready to view during the honeymoon.

Within days of the NUPUALS, the bride and groom can proof their treasured memories in a variety of forms:

On-line: A great venue for sharing the event with family and friends. They can view, select and purchase with a touch of button.

A Viewing Party: At a studio or at home …members of the wedding party can “reunite” to “relive” the memorial event as well as select and purchase. In many instances, they can even request some modifications to the pictures as well as conversion to black/white.

Hard bound album: HIGH quality coffee-table albums in a variety of styles and covers are available today in addition to the standard wedding albums.

Shirts/Cups/Plates: Wedding pictures can be transferred to a variety of media with today’s technology. These make great “thank you” gifts to the wedding party.

Weddings of yesteryear were costly and usually delivered in a envelope, with a few 8 x 10’s and a standard album… but today TOP quality wedding photography is available for every budget and the delivery rivals the most expensive weddings.

With the advances in technology and the versatility of digital photography, treasured memories have stepped out of the envelope and off of the pages of the standard album into a world of endless POSSIBILITES!

Christian Young Photography