Photographing your layouts

Is it not the most upsetting when you work so hard on our scrapbooking project and go to take a picture just to see that it doesn't look half as good as you would have liked??  That's how I was feeling for a long time now, honestly too long!  So while on the Two Peas Blog I read one of the best posts, Photographing Your Projects with Jen.  This post really opened a door for me and got me thinking. 

I was at Staples and checked out the poster board because of course, I had to try this.  I have a nice new camera, the Nikon J1, which I love and it still wasn't showing the detail and capturing my pictures as I would like.  Of course I wanted two pieces of posterboard for this, one for the bottom/floor and one for the backdrop.  I was being cheap and the posterboard was $15 for two pieces after tax and I said no.  SoOoo my battle continued and was back to square one.  When I got home I searched for whatever pieces of scrap wood we had leftover for my scraproom project and came across the perfect size of plywood.  I took a can of leftover white paint and painted a coat to make my own backdrop.  We had a leftover piece of white laminted MDF and brown (like hardwood) from what??? I have no idea, I assume something when it came to building the house.

So after my FREE photo backdrop this is what I had. I took all of my layouts that I have uploaded to my TwoPeas Gallery and re-took pictures of ALL of them.  To say the difference wasn't that noticeable is an understandment.   I'm kind of mad at myself because I deleted all the original pictures so I can't even show you how different they look (in an incredible way.)  I placed my little photo studio in our dinning room where there is lots of natural light, kept the lights off, and shot away.  I'm telling you having a nice white backdrop and floor is amazing and truly makes a heck of a difference. 

I took my photos at a normal looking at the picture view from across.  Today, Ali Edwards has a great blog post about how she photographs her Project Life albums.  She basically follows these same tips but takes her photos from above by standing on a chair.  I'm thinking I will definitely be trying this approach to see if I like it any better.

How do you take your photos?  Have you found any helpful tips and tricks??

Thanks for following along <3

Christine