This segment is for giving you ideas on how to preserve your family memories. Many times it is our family history or our parent’s and grandparent’s stories that we want to preserve. Some clients have brought in birth records, marriage certificates, death notices and news articles that document their family history. Ancestory.com is also a useful resource that many clients have used to find historical family records. One client recently found a ship manifest there listing some relatives who came to America. We have special scanners to carefully handle your oversized and delicate documents. Once we have a digital image we can create a book, DVD slideshow or more….we are limited only by your imagination!
Leave A Legacy is growing up! This October, our Fort Collins store celebrates 5 years of preserving memories! AND our new Denver store celebrates one year! Wow – I can’t believe we’re growing up so fast…
So…to celebrate our own upcoming anniversary, we’ve decided to share some of our gift and celebration ideas for anyone out there celebrating an anniversary of their own!
Gift Ideas
1st Anniversary – Make a photobook of your first year together. Or if you’re a photo-taking junkie and wouldn’t dream of fitting the entire first year into one book, make a photobook or DVD slideshow of your wedding and/or honeymoon!
5th Anniversary – Beginning to tire of spending lots of money on anniversary gifts? Inexpensively create a custom gift such as a champagne bottle label. Enjoy yourselves and your personalized bottle while sipping the bubbly. Include your favorite photo together and a heartfelt message expressing your love for one another.
Celebration Ideas
Newlyweds – Start a tradition. Look through your favorite photos and pick one at a meaningful location. Visit this place yearly and document your visit with a photo in the same place and position each year.
Seasoned Spouses – Get out of your daily routine of chores and evening television and stay at a romantic Bed & Breakfast. Let someone else do the cooking and cleaning for you and just relax. Bring along some home videos and scrapbooks to relive your favorite memories together.
Last month, we offered a few summer travel photo tips to keep you organized and prepared to capture those unforgettable moments. Here’s Part 2 showcasing tips on how to turn a mundane moment into a praiseworthy picture.
Don't forget to put yourself in the photo!
- GROUP SHOT. In the spirit of “no family member left behind,” it’s important to get at least one group shot while on vacation together. So whether you use a tripod or ask a total stranger to help out, it’s never too early to get your holiday card shot while the whole gang’s together.
- BLINKING IS BAD, BUT NOT LOOKING IS GOOD. On vacations, kids have the tendency to get wrapped up in many new experiences. Don’t forget to take pictures of them exploring even if they don’t know it. Some of the best pictures are the candid action shots.
- EVERY MOMENT, NOT JUST THE SCENIC ONES. Everyone loves a beautiful sunset or the iconic shot of the Empire State Building. But don’t forget to capture the less thrilling moments too, like getting packed, being in the plane or goofing off at a hotel or campsite.
- TAKE TIME TO REFLECT. At the end of each busy day, spend some time talking about each family member’s favorite moments. Add these thoughts and anecdotes to the pictures from that day to create a rich, integrated story of your special time together as a family.
- IT’S OK TO BE CLICHÉD. As photographers, we tend to want to take a photo that’s different. However, trying to frame every one of your travel photos to be ‘unique’ will either get you extremely frustrated, have you snapping up only 30 photos, or both. It’s fine to take a photo of the Eiffel Tower front-on, or the illusion that your friend’s pushing the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
- IT WON’T BE MUNDANE ONE YEAR FROM NOW. Like cliched photos, it’s also fine to take less than stunning subjects. The confusing currencies, the weird and wonderful signs, what you see while staring out the window. Don’t delete the ‘boring’ photos! They might seem mundane a few seconds after you’ve taken them. But you’d look back on them a year from now and realize just how well they’ve documented your travels.
- BE CREATIVE, USE PROPS. The souvenirs and postcards you purchase, use them as props in your next photo. It’s a sure way to get you thinking out of the box and produce some interesting photos.
- TAKE NOTES. A picture might be worth a thousand words, but sometimes it still doesn’t express how you really feel. Excitement? Culture shocked? Home sick? Carry a small notebook around and just jot down a few sentences when you feel over-whelmed to do so, along with the image number.
- PUT YOURSELF IN THE PHOTO. As photographers, we often forget to put ourselves in front of the camera. Don’t just shoot a self-portrait with your arms stretched out in front of you (yes, we’ve all done that plenty of times). Give your camera to a trusting-looking passerby!
If you are traveling this summer, you’ll want to bring your camera with you. Here are some quick tips to help make your summer travel photo experience trouble-free:
- BRING EXTRA PHOTO CARDS. If you are traveling by plane, take your camera with you on the plane. Carry at least two photo cards, or whatever you feel you will need based on the number of pictures you expect to take. Buying additional cards may be difficult, inconvenient or expensive, depending on where you are traveling.
- TO SAVE SPACE, review your photos in your camera along the way and delete any you won’t want, or bring a portable storage device so you can offload the cards and free up space.
- FOR A BACKUP in case your camera and photo cards get lost or stolen—if you have Internet access—upload your photos to a photo sharing/storage site (it’s free, you just need to sign up for a free account). You can even e-mail images to your friends and family back home.
- BRING AT LEAST ONE EXTRA BATTERY, so one battery can be charging while you are using the other one. If you are traveling overseas, try to get a dual voltage charger to avoid needing a separate voltage transformer. It is not fun to be caught with insufficient or the wrong power and miss photo ops.
- KEEP YOUR CAMERA EQUIPMENT ORGANIZED. Band the charger cords and cables with Velcro or elastic bands so they are not a jumbled mess and put them in a plastic bag with your charger and other essentials.
- BRING YOUR CAMERA WITH YOU WHEREVER YOU GO. You never know when a great photo op may arise.
- READ THE INSTRUCTIONS. If you just bought a new camera, familiarize yourself with the features before your trip. If you don’t want to drag the manual with you, you can probably look it up on line in a pinch. Since many camera manufacturers put manuals on their web site, it can’t hurt to take note of the web address so if you get stuck you can look up your camera’s features online at a cyber café.
- OUTDOOR SHOTS. When traveling you are likely to be taking a lot of outdoor shots. When taking photos in the shade or bright sunlight, use your camera’s fill flash. This will help fix contrast and dark shadows. Read your camera’s manual to learn how to use this feature on your camera.
- GETTING THERE IS HALF THE FUN. You begin traveling the moment you step out that door. So start snapping away your journey to the airport; touching down at your destination and being utterly confused; being tightly packed on a bumpy bus ride; the disappointment when your hotel doesn’t look like the picture on the brochure. Don’t forget to document the journey – the destination is only half the fun!
Leave A Legacy is one of the few companies primarily built for our local customers who wish to transfer their old memories and convert them to a more modern format, such as VHS to DVD, slide scanning to DVD and transfer 8mm film to DVD. Images, such as photographs, slides, and negatives have been around for decades as a means for people to capture special moments. Often times, as we collect and take new pictures over the years, these images can begin to take up all sorts of space! In this new technological era, many of us would find it much easier to digitize the images onto a computer, and load them all onto a DVD or a hard drive. However, many people do not have the time to do this themselves, and instead opt to use a transfer or scanning service to accomplish it for them. Usually you would box your photos up, and ship them off to destinations unknown, and pray you get everything back. However, have you looked to see if there are more convenient local options available? Here are some of the benefits of keeping your media local.
Peace of Mind – Keeping your images local, and close to you will ensure that your media will not get lost in transit, or misplaced at any point during the shipping process. Since we, at Leave A Legacy, handle all of our orders directly in our offices, you’ll know where your precious media is at all times. Once you leave your memories in our hands, they will remain safe until you come in to pick up your new DVDs.
Customer Experience – Leave A Legacy is set up to allow one on one interactions with the image scanning technician working on your order. This starts with the initial order-taking process. If at all possible, we will match your image scanning order with the technician who will be doing the bulk of the work on the order. This same technician will also be contacting you throughout the transfer process to indicate when the order had been completed, or if any additional information is required. In turn, our customers are encouraged to contact their technicians through phone or email, if they think of anything else they’d like to add or otherwise change their initial order. This will help ensure that your order is processed to your exact specifications and details.
Fast Turnaround – When dealing with local companies, you will often get a much faster turnaround than if you were to mail it off to a processing facility. Depending on how much media you bring in, we can sometimes have your order finished within 24 hours. This alone will save you not only time, but massive shipping and handling costs.
Competitive Costs – While you may not find the extreme low costs you’d see from businesses employing the use of document scanners or third-world labor, Leave A Legacy has a competitive pricing structure, with nice discounts applied if you bring in more and more media.
Courtesy of: Alan Chase
A client’s tribute to her father on his 80th birthday was a heart warming project to be a part of. At Leave A Legacy we encourage clients to do as much of the creative work as they desire or have time for.
This client created her own digital scrapbook pages using a selection of special photos and documents from her father’s life. She designed several pages and we were enlisted to print them all on some heavy glossy paper and then bind it in a black rigid cover.
All too often we leave the special feelings in our heart unsaid to the one’s we love. She definitely honored her father on his benchmark birthday with this special bound book and preserved memories of him for later generations.
Leave A Legacy now offers on-line video preview. This 
allows you to view your production – created from your video tapes, movie films, photos or slides – on your home or office computer. We connect your computer and our computer over the internet. You can watch what we play or while we make edits on our computer. You can hear the audio of your production over the phone.
We’ve had one client couple who previewed their production playing on our computer in Fort Collins while they each viewed it at their work computers at two different locations in the Denver metro area.
While a client previews their video production they see changes that they want made. Clients can either make notes as they watch or may talk to one of our team to tell them about needed changes.
At Leave A Legacy, we do our best to find convenient solutions to help you preserve your memories with digital creations. With on-line video preview of your video production you’ll know just how it will look when you take the final product home with you.
At the end of this past school year a returning client brought us another unique photo manipulation project. 
Her daughter’s school has a tradition of the graduating class donating something of significance to the school. This is just elementary mind you, so it might be more the parent’s thoughts and money going into it. They came up with a great modern idea to buy a flat screen TV, have some lettering made and create a dynamic information wall by the school office. Their biggest problem was time so she thought of presenting it virtually at the graduation ceremony. 
She took several photos at the school (the wall, the couch, etc.), 
we found some images of a widescreen on the internet and also the school’s logo. We manipulated the photos by “removing” all of the things on the wall, did some masonry work on the wall, added the text in a curve and gave it an effect to look gold and 3 dimensional “hung” the wide screen and “projected” some images on it.
The final result (a jpg file) was projected on the screen after the graduation slideshow. What an interesting photo manipulation project!
I’ve been quiet the last few weeks because our family went on an inspiring family trip to Hamburg, Paris, and Rome. Many people told me, “take lots of pictures”. That is a silly thing to say to me. But in addition to taking lots of pictures I also journaled the events of our memory filled trip.
I have the guide book that I used to plan our travels which also gave great descriptions about what we were seeing. I have my notes about where we were going and what we were seeing each day.
I wrote in my journal as the trip went along and wrote about the hits and misses on the food we ordered. “Wes and Cheryl were trying to play it safe and order something with beef. It wasn’t until the dish was served that we remembered that beef tartar is finely cut raw beef steak. They both struggled to choke it down.”
I also wrote about our experiences with new forms of travel. “The doors on the Paris Metro are reminiscent of the guillotine that was once a popular form of correction. Our first try on the Metro was painful, at least for Aspen. When the doors closed she had half of one arm, and elbow of the other arm, and her suitcase one half in the train when it was ready to leave the station.”
My digital photo books always have lots of text in them to go with the lots
of photos. I also kept lots of memorabilia that I will scan in: bottle labels, ticket stubs, coins, a unique ice cream spoon, sand, stones, and bark.
While on the metro in Paris I saw that Leave A Legacy has some competition. The photo shows an advertisement poster in our metro car.
A recent interesting project that came into
Leave A Legacy was a lady who was working on a shadow box honoring her husband’s football career. He passed away a few years ago but he had kept quite a scrapbook of his football career from high school through college and the pros. She just needed our help to reprint a few photos in just the right size. The shadow box will ultimately contain these photos and the 2 jerseys from his college and professional football career. We can’t show you a photo of it as she would like to keep it private, but we thought it might give you a good idea for preserving your family memories.
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