Hey, everyone. Welcome to Modern Photo Solutions. I'm Steph, and I am here today with Chelle Ludwinski. Hi, Chelle. Hi, Steph. Thanks for being here today. Hey, it's always fun to chat with you. Yeah. So Chelle and I go way back, right? Yeah, way back. We've known each other for a few years now, from the digital scrapbooking community actually, but Chelle has been a documenter and a memory keeper for a very, very long time and has gone through kind of an evolution throughout her life changing her style and changing her methods as her life has changed and as her needs have changed. In the last couple of years, she started using the Project Life app. Let me actually share first where people can find you. If you're interested in catching up with Chelle, you can find her on Instagram, Chelle_Ludwinski. I'll put a link to that in the show notes too so people know how to spell it. It's Chelle_Ludwinski. How long have you been using the Project Life app now? Right after it came out I made like one or two pages and I just didn't love it at that time. It just kind of sat on my phone. Probably about a year ago I just felt like I wasn't able to save my stories. I just didn't feel MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 1
like I had time. I started then. We had made a trip to Disneyland and I thought back on it and went, "You know, I actually don't even think... Our first trip with our little boy to Disneyland I got the stories and the pictures in a book right away because I wanted him to not forget. We'd been back like two or three more times and those had never made it in print or anywhere else for him to be able to look at. Last year when we went in early February I was like, "I've got to do something. Even if all I do is put them in the Project Life app." I found it was so easy and it was so fast and I could do it... I spend a lot of time waiting in lines. I have a 15 year old in a wheelchair and we have waiting in the doctor's office, waiting at therapy, waiting somewhere either at soccer practice for my little guy, somewhere I'm waiting. It was so easy because at the end of the day with those times where I was waiting here and waiting there, I was done with it. I was able to put that first one together. Fortunately this past year we were able to get annual passes and we made three trips in the first half of the year where we were able... We just took our two youngest, our son in a wheelchair and then our little guy. He turned seven. He's six years old at the time. I was able to when we got home to just go ahead and within a couple of weeks I was ready to have it done. In fact, I think it was the second trip that I had most of the pages done on the airplane on the way home. Wow. I was like this is so much nicer than... In fact, I still have those trips from 2014 and 2015 that I'm going now that I've learned the things in the Heart, I don't know if I know the title of it, the Heart class. MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 2
The Heart of Photo Fabulous. Now that I've gone through that, I'm going, "Okay. Now I can do these." They're next on my list to go back and be able to look at how he's changed through those times and to share the stories of those visits as well. Okay. Great. That's really good to hear, because you were one of my beta testers too of the class that went through everything. Right. Even though you were a Project Life app user, you said that you learned stuff. I did. I wondered if it would just be following through and wondering what questions people might have. I kept my phone notes app open as I was going through it. I would be like, "No way, wait, I've got to rewind that. What did she say? Okay. I do this, this and I'd try everything as you were talking doing it." I was like, "This is so much faster." The ways that I was trying to get pictures or cards or different things that I wanted from app to back and forth, I was like, "Oh, this is so much faster than what I've been doing, so much faster." I didn't know about some of the organizational things with keeping them organized, because I'm presently working on my daughter served a mission for our church and I'm putting her photos into... I'm trying to tell those stories and the e-mails that she sent us while she was gone and putting those together, and so I'm simultaneously working on that as well as I do just daily documenting of what's going on with our lives, as well as doing some of these trips, and being able to keep track of MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 3
which page I'm working on with what I was like, "Wow, this is going to be so much better." There were a lot of things that I learned that I didn't even having used it to do, I really think it was over 100 pages that I had done before the class. I was going, "Wow, there is a lot of stuff in here that I can use that will work my work flow so much better." Yay, I love hearing that. Thank you. Already I was like, and it got me so excited again, I was like seven pages before I can go to bed. I'm laying in bed at night going, "You should go to bed. It doesn't take that long. You can do this tomorrow. No, it's so cool. Look what else I did." The inner struggle with yourself. My husband is, "Are you going to bed?" I'm like, "In a minute." Yeah. "Shut off that phone." "Okay, just a minute." Do you remember when you started documenting and telling your story like when in your life? I was thinking about that when listening to the last couple of podcasts when you were talking about how long ago and said that it sounded like a long time or it made you sound really old. I was like, "I haven't done it for that... Oh, yeah, I have." MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 4
I was the treasurer of my sorority in college, not the treasurer. Historian? Yeah, historian. That was when I first started. At that point, we used typing paper because yeah, that's what we had at that point, typing paper and construction paper and we rubber cemented the pictures on the pages. I have, it was an old book. Of course the sorority has it, but it was, you know, that old yellow rough paper, a great big book that was probably like 10 by 15 that that was what I put the pictures on at that time. It was when I was in college was when I first started. My mom had not a whole bunch but she had a few pages that she had made. She'd cut out... I know that she was in a school program when she was probably 10 and she had a picture of that. She cut out little holly berries out of construction paper and glued them in a book. I come by it from her. She just did a little bit. Probably about when she was in high school she put together a little bit of her life story at that point. It was probably around that same time that I was thinking about the same thing putting things together. My early, the early storytelling that I have is mostly from that. When my girls were little, they would ask questions about when I was little. I always wanted to tell their story and I always kept their pictures and did some scrapbooking with their stories. They had questions about me. I just sat down, really it was with my computer, and I would think about something. When I'd tell them a story, I'd try to write it down and then I put just those stories and pictures together in a bound book. I can't remember if I know the name of the company, but it was a long time ago like a Shutterfly book that just has the pictures and the stories in it. MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 5
Like Blurb maybe? It may have been Blurb or it may have been Shutterfly. I'm not even sure who it was. It was just stories I remembered from when I was little. They're in no organized fashion whatsoever. What I remember about going to my grandparents every Sunday night and what I remember about the baseball games on Thursday nights in our town and what we did, just little stuff that I remembered, what I remembered life being like when I was little. It's been a long time I've been telling stories. That's wonderful. I love hearing that. That's great, yeah. You've used a lot of different methods too. I have. That early, like I said, early on it was the typed paper and the construction paper and then when I was a young mom when I first had kids it was a lot of scrapbooking. I kind of got overwhelmed with scrapbooking. I was a supply... I don't know if I was a supply hoarder, because on my bookshelves out there I probably have like 40 Creative Memories scrapbooks. I did a lot of pages during that time, but I just got overwhelmed with all the stuff and I quit. I just started producing... I would still do the stories and the pictures, but I just printed them in books, stories and pictures with no embellishments and then one time recovering from surgery in like 2007 or 2008, I was actually Google searching for just some clip art or something that I could add to my daughter's, one of the stories that she was telling at the time and stumbled on digital scrapbooking and then became very heavily involved in that community for a number of years. MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 6
Even that, there were times during that time where digital scrapbooking worked for me and I had the time to be able to do it and there were times during that time where they just didn't fit into my life at that time and I have, as I mentioned, I've got a 15 year old with special needs that keeps me plenty busy and I have a little seven year old who's also very busy and it just didn't time wise fit. Right now what fits for me is being able to do... I do use Project Life primarily, but there are some other collage apps I sometimes use but that's what fits right now for my lifestyle to be able to tell those stories and to be able to have those memories preserved so that we can remember them. Yeah, and have it go with you and so portable on your phone. Yes, so portable wherever it happens to be and start and stop it's so easily done. Get a little bit done and then okay, close down the app and go do whatever we need to and then the next time we're standing waiting we can work on it again. That's one of the things that I love about the Project Life app is I never have to remember to save. If I get sidetracked or I'm at the doctor's office and they call my name and I have to hurry and stand up and leave, I know that if that app gets closed or that page that I'm working on gets closed it's still going to be in there in the app. There aren't any other even collage apps that do that. Yeah, that's one of my hangups about one of the other collage apps I use. I'm like, "Okay. Do you have everything right here that you need to finish this, because you have to finish this whole thing and it doesn't get closed" where Project Life it snaps right back to where you were. If you're in the middle of it and go, "Oh, you know what, I think... I was working on my son's kindergarten graduation and I realized that I was MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 7
taking photos. My daughter was doing video next to me at the same time. I didn't know which of my daughters so I sent a text to them saying, "Does anybody have video footage of his graduation?" The one responded and said, "Yeah, I do." But I knew I couldn't finish the page right then until I got the video. Yeah. It's still there and it saved and I just work on other things in the meantime. Yeah, it's a great thing, really good thing. Let's try a little bit of the projects that you've done, because in the Heart of Photo Fabulous you came in yesterday and you posted I think three or four different Disney albums that you've done. There are three that I've done. I have that first Disney album that I did. How many hours I worked on that to try and get it done. It took me about a month and I did one page per day to get it done. The others I can get done, the others I've done so quickly and we love them. We went on the three trips last year so I have those three. I have done some vacation ones and then I used the Collect app to encourage me to take a photo a day. So after I finished that first Disney album, I was like, "You know, I kind of like this. I like how it worked. I think I like... I was worried about adapting to Project Life because I liked being able to... I didn't like everything to have to fit in neat little boxes. I wanted to make it a bigger box if I wanted or something like that. It turns out that after I did that first one I realized that it does fit with what I want and being able to have the story is better than just letting it sit there because it might not be perfect. MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 8
I went back with my Collect pictures from 2015 and used the Project Life app to tell the whole story of 2015 because the Collect app I had at least one picture of each day and a little blurb about it. Then I could just copy that to be able to have my journaling on everything, and so I went back and did all of 2015 that way and then, because I had the whole year, and then during 2016 I've maintained doing the one. I do two pages per week of what's going on. The layout I use in Project Life depends on do I have a lot of pictures this week or do I have a few pictures this week. If I have... There are still other special events like graduation was one I was working on that there were enough other things going on that week that I went ahead and did a whole nother spread that was graduation that shows him shaking his teacher's hand and a couple of the little songs and poems that they did and then she's got the video footage. I added a QR code with that on it. Sometime I have extra things. I have a daughter who got married this past year so there's a few extra pages in there that have some of the wedding things. I also in addition to doing those 2015 and 2016 and I have the three Disney albums and then I've done a couple like her wedding album I've done and a couple others like that, just some special event things. Do you have five kids? I have seven kids, two stepsons and then five kids with my husband and I. You are busy. MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 9
Yes, we are crazy busy. The thing is, the kids, as I was listening the podcast where you're talking about your kids, the kids and how they feel about it, I have a grandson who turns five this month. When he was I think two was when we took him with us on a family trip the first time we went to Jamaica and I sent his family a picture of it and he calls it "My Jamaica," and then we took them again last Christmas or after Christmas and I hadn't done anything. I hadn't put any books together after that time because, I don't know, it just hadn't occurred to me. When we were Skyping with him and he was talking about his "My Jamaica" and the pictures from it and I realized that how important that was to him. So for Christmas this last year I put together another one. I did that one in Project Life also just quickly put together some of the pictures that we had so that he can have that book of pictures with us. They live, what, we live in Utah and they live in Illinois. We're not even close to each other. That's one way that we can share other than Skype that we can share and he can remember the things that we get to do with him and how important it is to kids to be able to look at them. I love that. That's so great, so perfect. Let's talk a little bit about some of the roadblocks, because you weren't happy I guess I should say. You weren't a happy adopter of Project Life. Is that a good description? I don't know. Yeah, I was like this is too rigid for me. I want to do my thing. When I was digital scrapbooking or even when I was paper scrapbooking, I liked titles. That was just one of the fun things I liked creating, and it bothered me that I didn't know how I was going to do that in the MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 10
Project Life app. That was one thing. I didn't know if I could fit everything in the boxes and what if I wanted seven pictures instead of six. Knowing that I wanted that first Disneyland album done that I might not love it but I wanted it done really pushed me to do it. Once I tried it, I was like, "Oh, I so much more love having it done than that other thing." You talk a little bit about the trade-offs of the journaling is so easy in the Project Life app. I keep thinking that I'll do journaling on a different card or I'll do journaling on a photo or I'll do it some other way, but I keep reverting back to that journaling in the Project Life app because it's so easy to do it there. It was actually kind of forcing myself to use it and do a few. Then I was like, "Wow, this is so much better than I thought it would be." Once I realized that those things that I was worried about, they aren't really that big of a problem and if there's something else I want to do I can do it in another app and bring it in as a picture. There's a few tweaks that I found along the way that have made... I love the big picture ones. There's one of the add-on layouts, I guess that's what you call them, that you can purchase in the Project Life app has bigger pictures. I think it's called Big Shot. Yes. I love the big picture ones. Sometimes there are events where you just want that picture to take two-thirds of the page, but there's some... those also if they don't have it on the top and I want it on the bottom or if they only have it on the right-hand side and I want it on the left-hand side to be able to make some of those things work to even... Yeah, I have a wish list that I should e-mail to Becky and her crew to say, "These are the other things I would like you to add for layouts." Yeah, there are work-arounds for things that I was worried about and I found MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 11
out that those weren't as big a deal as I thought they were compared to how much we love seeing the memories in our hands. I totally agree, and I know I think what was the turning point for you was when you saw a book that I did and you said, "Wait a minute. You can have big photos." I think that was you e-mailed me and you said, "Is that really, is that in the Project Life app," because I love big photos and I didn't know you could do that. That was when you decided to give it a try. I think all of the pages and things that I had seen prior to that were just either two horizontal on top, four vertical little ones and two horizontal on the bottom. It's the one that comes up when you open the Project Life app before you choose the others. I was under the impression that everything was just like that. I was like, "Those are little and I like big things," and finding out there were other options that fit more with my style. I used the layouts that have a bigger photo on them on most of the ones that I do most of the time. I think of them, because I know that's how they're going to appear in my book. On one side I'll have more that are smaller but the other side usually has a big photo. I'm not sure the sizes like the 5 by 7 size or it might be taking up two-thirds of the page, but I like the bigger photos. Yeah, I love... In fact, what's interesting is those exact templates that you use I haven't used all that often; but when you posted your books in our Facebook group yesterday, I went through and was dissecting exactly and I had my app out and was comparing and, "Oh, she used this template here and this template there," because I loved how you used them. Yeah, it is the Big Shot pack. Big Shot 1 and 2 I think you used a lot. MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 12
Yeah, they're my go to favorite ones. I almost wished there was a sort function, because you see all of them across the bottom as you're choosing. I almost wish it was like a most recent or a most popular used because I always have to scroll all the way to the right to find those. That's a really good idea. When I was watching in the class, I do the same thing. I would look at it and go, "Wait, she's got those two photos side by side on that one. I could do that." I love being able to see the ideas and figure out which one. Yeah. You did a Capturing Magic, because you write for me over at Capturing Magic. I don't even know if I've talked about that site on this podcast yet, but I should. Capturing Magic is a Disney... It's dedicated to Disney memory keeping, and it's a site over there that I have. I also have a podcast over there with Tanya and Heather that are my cohosts. Chelle did a tutorial over at Capturing Magic over a year ago, I think, I want to say where you showed how to rotate the templates, how to rotate the photos so that you can rotate the templates. Yeah, you basically create the page upside down. I don't use it all the time. It does take a little extra brain power for me to turn things upside down. Yeah, it's a great one. The journaling inside of Project Life is really... I'll do the journaling in the collage section of the Project Life app just on a card and then I can save that as a picture and then I can easily turn it upside down also. MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 13
Smart, very smart. For me that's kind of mathematical thinking and I'm not as good at that. It's really cool. Maybe we'll have to see about doing some kind of a Facebook Live or something in the Facebook group and have you demonstrate that sometime. That would be fun. It would be a lot of fun. When I'm saying Facebook group, I'm talking about... Today I'm talking about the Facebook group for the class Heart of Photo Fabulous when you purchase the class you also get admission into a private Facebook group for other people just like you that have purchased the class and everyone is sharing ideas and asking questions. It's been really fun. People are already finishing the class. They buy it and finish it in a day, and they're being super productive. It's fun to see the pages that they're sharing and having a group to bounce off questions and get answers, "Okay. This is my situation. What works best?" It's been really fun. Yeah, yeah. I'm really enjoying having it and having everyone in there and seeing the... I don't know everything. I know a lot but I don't know everything. There are definitely people that come in with fresh ideas and different ways of looking at things and share them. Just like you with rotating that template. I never would have thought of doing that. It's a perfect solution if that's how you want things to look. If that's how you need it. Yeah, for your photos, yeah, for sure. What are you working on next? MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 14
I love my weekly things, because it helps me think back on what happened that week and what the highlights were, but I've kind of hit a point where I want to share more than one spread per week. There's more things going on in our lives. See. I know. I have a daughter that just got married. I'm going, "Dude, I could do a whole page per week of the things like she'll send me pictures and text me." She doesn't live at all close to me. She does send pictures via text. I encourage both of my daughters. I have another daughter that's also away at college. We share a lot of pictures back and forth of what's going on. Sometimes it's just a screenshot I have of a funny conversation we had that I'm going, "You know, I'm almost to the point where I'd like to go to two -- It's not two pages, it would be two spreads, four pages per week, because there's more story to tell and I know from experience that they are going to look back on these times and want to be able to have that story to tell of what life was like during that time, especially as they're going through stages of college and getting married and asking questions about what I was doing at that time. I know we're going to want that, and I strongly encourage them all the time to have the pictures. That's kind of what I'm working on, as well as going back. I mentioned that I have, I've documented our lives. I've been better at sometimes than others. When my daughter that just got married was little, we documented that really well up until the stories of what was going on until she was about two or three and then I kind of shifted and worked on her sister and documenting that one. MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 15
The year that my son was born, we have that one that I've documented that year fairly well but then not in between. I was kind of overwhelmed with how can I use the Project Life app if the pictures aren't on my phone and the logistics of getting the pictures back and forth. After completing both of the classes, I know, both the introductory class and the other one, I know where to start on that one. That's my next project. Other than our upcoming Disney trips, those will probably preempt everything else. [crosstalk 00:23:59]. I want to go back to 2013 and 2014, because 2015 is when I started with Project Life, go back to 2013 and 2014 and fill in gaps, stories I haven't told and put those together. As I mentioned, I'm working on that album of my daughter's mission and I'm encouraging her to add the story. I have all of the e-mails that she sent, but I work on the pages. This is another thing we can do with the Project Life app. I work on the pages and put the pictures in and the cards in, everything ready to go, and she just has to add the story to it and then I... Because in the Project Life app you can also download an editable copy and then I can send it to her and she can upload it and just add the journaling part in if that's all the time she has with her busy college schedule. So she's adding the journaling and you take the e-mail, the editable version, you e-mail it to her, she loads it into Project Life, the editable version into the Project Life app and then she adds the journaling? Right. I think that's such a brilliant way to do it. MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 16
She's not... When we talked about it with her going to college and then getting married and everything, how busy she was, she was like, "Mom, I like this, but I can't do it. I just don't have the time and you have the time. You do it." I was like, "Actually I'll do this part, but I want you to tell the story." I cut and pasted all of the e-mails that she sent us over that 18 months into a Word document. So she's got that whole, everything is in there so she can go back and look if she had any questions about things. I'm letting her tell the story in case it wasn't something that she wrote us about, if there's more to the story than that or if there's something else that happened later that I don't know. I'm letting her go ahead and add the story part to it, and then she can send them back to me when we're ready to print that in a format that she can keep. I don't know if she's just going to keep them in hers with the journaling in it in her version of Project Life and we'll just download them from there or if she'll just export them and mail them back to me as finished pages. She's working on we've got the first dozen or so that we're working on right now. I think it's a great solution. I think that that would work for people that have kids at college, anytime there's grandkids' separations, any kind of a thing, it's a great way to work it out. For my daughter, I am working on her album as we go. When we talked at Christmas, she said that she has so many stories to tell us and she's keeping a list of all of the stories that she wants to tell us when she gets home. I said, "Well, I am leaving some blank journaling spots, because I am printing it up as I go too, but I am leaving some 4 by 6 spots that are blank so that she can write. So she can go back. MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 17
She'll just write on the printed photograph pages like it's a card. That will be great for her to be able to add those. I know Natalie would say, "You can look at the pictures, but I want to tell you more about the pictures," because they're busy, they don't have time to tell you everything that they would and what memories spring to her mind and what stories she has when she looks back on those pictures. I want her to be able to share those. Yeah, I think it's really, really smart. Hopefully it helps people, these ideas and suggestions help people that maybe don't have kids doing the same kinds of things but maybe other things, college, other kinds of projects, fun things like that. Unfortunately as we were talking about before we started recording, unfortunately our kids grow up. Yes, they do. They move away. Isn't the technology we have that we can still share their lives with them. We were reminiscing about how when I first got married I moved halfway across the country from my parents. If I wanted to show my mom what my apartment looked like or what anything looked like, I was snapping 36 photos until the roll was done and then taking it to be developed and then I would mail them to her. Now as my daughter was unpacking her wedding gifts and putting things away in the cupboard, she was snapping photos and texting them to me. Of course I'm saving all those photos, but nevertheless what great communication we're able to have now with the technology. MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 18
Yeah, for sure, for sure. Another application that I just thought of for this kind of a thing that you're doing, mailing or sending the editable pages, my dad just retired a week ago and I was up in Utah for that. I had a photographer, Aubrey Larson. You can find her on Instagram. I think it's Aubrey Larson Photo is what it is. She came and did pictures for me. I was really grateful to her, because it was a last minute thing. She took a lot of really great photos and photos of details. So what I am going to do now, because of the suggestion, is put them together in the Project Life app. What I'll probably do is send my dad screenshots of the pages and have him type back, text or e-mail me back the journaling that he wants on those pages so that I can put together a book for him. That will be wonderful for him to be able to edit the story that way and get it in his words. That will be fabulous. I love the #52 stories that you talked about. I went, "You know what, I want to go back to telling more stories." I thought that when I put that book together it wasn't organized and it wasn't complete. It was just lots of little things I remembered about growing up. We've had so much more of that as we reflected on the life changes that my kids are going through right now that I went, "I want to tell more stories. I love being able to tell the stories." There are things that I want my kids and grandkids to know that are things that I wanted to know about my grandparents. Some I do. Some I don't. I went, "That's an easy way for me to do that." I also have... If I can find a photo to go with it, great. If I can't, then I'll just pick a different photo that I have of something. Even if it's like I live in the same community that... I now live in the same community that I grew up in. I haven't always. Even if it's just a picture of the park. It's not what it looked like when I was there as a kid, but it's a picture of the MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 19
park. I'm excited to work on that project too of being able to tell those stories. Yeah. How did your mom like her gift? Is she excited about that? She hasn't done anything with it yet. It's a work in progress. It's a work in progress. Okay. I'm so disappointed that she wasn't as excited about it as I was, but she's getting there. Now that my dad's retirement is done and they're actually... They flew back to Arizona with me and they're staying here for a few weeks. You know something is going to happen with it while she's here. Yeah, and even if it can be audio, I love how things can be record the audio and it's not near as difficult to get that transcribed as it used to be. There's resources for that as well. If your children are listening to her tell it, as she's telling it. After I first got married, I called my grandmother. We picked I think it was Sunday afternoon around four o'clock because we knew she wouldn't have people visiting at that time and I would just call her on Sunday afternoon for a year I called her at four o'clock in the afternoon every Sunday afternoon and I would ask her a different question and she would tell me the answer to the question that was usually about her growing up and I would take notes as fast as I could on what she was saying at the time. I love that. MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 20
I love having those stories. That's a great idea. In fact, I just thought, you know what, if one of my kids asked her to do it, it would get done. I think we kind of sometimes get overwhelmed with telling our story has to be perfect punctuation and perfect grammar. It doesn't. It doesn't. The words, the documenting, the storytelling, the journaling, whatever you want to call it on my pages that I create in Project Life, they sound like me talking. I use ellipses whenever I trail off on a sentence and start a new topic. I use the slang that I use when I go dude all the time. That's in my journaling. At this point I'm like, "You know what? That's me and that's what my kids are going to remember. It doesn't matter if it's not proper grammar or anything." I think sometimes we get hung up on that that's what it has to be if we have to write that. As I'm working on the 52 stories, I'm just writing whatever comes to my mind in whatever format it's in. If it's not even spellchecked, if there's the little red underline under things, I might try fixing it or I might not. Good for you. I love hearing that. It's the real me. It's the same thing with photos. I'm in the photos whether I like what I look like or not because this is me. Exactly. Me too. I hadn't realized that until... I'm in very few photos of my older kids. With our last little one, I'm in lots of photos with him because I went, MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 21
"You know what, I want him to remember me," and this is what he loves. This is the person he loves. Yes. You say warts and all. That's the saying. Yeah. Stretchmarks and everything, right, yes. It's what I talk like, it's what I sound like and it's what I look like. That is the story and that's what they'll have. It's the truth. It's the truth. I think it's really important for all of us to, as Katie would say, get over ourselves. Just get over ourselves and get in the photos. And get in the photos. Because it's so important to do. Also selfies aren't all that flattering. I think we're not as worried about what we look like as we used to be when my older kids were little to where I'm like, "It's not a great photo. It doesn't matter." Exactly. That's the truth. I'm okay with that now. One of the things that I'm thinking about as we're talking is that you probably have a lot of albums, photo books, lots of things that you've MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 22
put together and compiled over the years. Do you ever think, "All right. This is too much?" No, no, I don't, I don't ever think. The kids pull them out and I'm surprised at how often come off the shelf. My daughters sharing them with... and he looked through it with her one of the first times that he came to visit our family. The same thing when she went up to visit his family that was what... She was joking about the fact she goes, "Well, when you go to work, me and your mom will look through your baby scrapbook." I don't ever think that it's too much. Some of them the books that I have are ancestors. My husband's father died shortly after we were married, and so none of my children have met him, but I put together the information we had and the pictures that we had I got from my husband and his siblings into just a book. Again, it's one of those early Blurb or Shutterfly. It's just there's a picture on this page and a whole lot of words on this page. It's not anything fancy, but they'll pull those out and ask questions about their origin, about the people that we know. No, I don't worry that there's too much. We are looking at them, we're enjoying them. There's plenty of space on the bookshelf. If not, we'll get another bookshelf and add to it. I love us being able to have that connection and those stories. Thank you. I appreciate that so much. One of the comments that I get as people are looking at the daily page that I do to document my life right now and they keep saying that's just so much. Don't you think it's going to be too much, too many books? I thought today I thought, you know, this is kind of my journal. It's like my photo journal. Would you ever tell somebody that they journal too much, that they're writing too MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 23
much of their story? It's a very similar thing for me but I'm using modern methods of pairing together photos and words. When people were just doing journals where they were hand writing, it was because they didn't have other things. Sometimes they would draw pictures. They didn't have cameras and things like that. I'm using it in a similar way and so for me I don't think that you could... I don't think that I would ever say and I don't want people to say to me that it's too much, because it's my story, it's my life and it's what I'm getting down and I don't think that you can ever say that you have too much of your story, too many memories. No, definitely not. Can you imagine what those like my mom has written in a journal for years. If she'd been able to share a picture of what was going on in the early times, that's what she would have done. They did draw pictures sometimes. We're just doing it in a way that fits with today. Yeah, yeah, that's what I think too. Okay. Thank you, Chelle, so much for your time today and for all of the inspiration. It's been great visiting with you. If you want to catch up with Chelle, you can find her on Instagram Chelle_Ludwinski and then also she's on Facebook, and she's very active in the Heart of Photo Fabulous private Facebook group for those that are in the class, Heart of Photo Fabulous, and then also in the Facebook group for the finishers. It's called Finishers Photo Fabulous First Step. You get an invite automatically to that when you finish the class to 100%. I always double verify to make sure that people are at 100% before I approve them into that group. You can find Chelle either of those places as well. Anywhere else, Chelle, right? MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 24
That's pretty much it now. That's where I'm sharing things and spending my online time. Yeah. All right. A lot of you might remember Chelle as Chelle's Creations when she was a digital scrapbook designer back in the day. Back in the day. We say that like it was forever ago. Really it was just a couple years. It was last year, yeah. Last year. Okay. That's so funny. Like it's been forever. In digital time, that's forever. It does feel like forever to me because there's been so many changes in my life during that last... For sure, for sure. All right. Thank you again for being here. Oh, thank you. It's so fun to chat with you. Yeah. We will see you next time on Modern Photo Solutions. MODERN PHOTO SOLUTIONS 25