Photos Bring the Story to Life

photo by Karolina Grabowska

In any personal history project, photographs can amplify the text in extraordinary ways. The pictures are as significant as the words, and they require many hours of work.

The challenge is to get the right photos in the right format. The client typically goes through boxes and albumns and finds way, way, way too many images. How do they decide which ones would be best? This is a good question that leads directly back to the text. Once the client’s story is written, then the manuscript provides the story to be “illustrated.” Photo selection becomes easier. Photos then fall on or off the pages, so to speak.

We need to work with digital images, of the highest resolution possible, but not less than 600 dpi. Unfortunately this can rule out some small family snapshots. We don’t want to remove an original image from the client’s home or office, because we don’t want the responsibility of keeping heirloom photographs safe. If it’s helpful, I can bring a portable scanner to the client and scan the pictures and documents.

A caption must accompany each photo. If the client doesn’t send captions with the digital images, then we end up with “floaters” — Who are these people? Where are they? When? The client and I send images back and forth via email until they are tagged appropriately, and that takes time.

A client generally sends the images to me via email attachments, but ultimately I order them and attach their captions in Dropbox, so that the client can see them too, in story order.

The right images in the right place add to the magical heirloom quality to the story, and bring it to life.

Copyright © 2013 by Mary Beth Lagerborg