Photobird Daily

If you like arts and crafts and being creative with your photos, you should read Baby Face: Celebrating Your Pregnancy and Baby with Beautiful Photo Crafts, a new book by Barbara Smith. This book shows you step-by-step how to create fun and personal baby shower invites, charming birth announcements, brag books, calendars, cards, and delightful birthday invitations — all using your own photos. You’ll learn how to use Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Photoshop Elements and a plethora of beautiful papers to produce wonderful stationery, gifts, and albums destined to be cherished keepsakes.

Barbara Smith teaches you all the basics, including a paper primer, toolbox tour, layout lessons, and creative photo techniques for taking pregnancy, infant, and young children’s photos.

In addition to the beautiful thank-you notes, holiday cards, and gift tags she’ll show you how to create, I was impressed to see her easy-to-follow instructions and troubleshooting tips on how to make keepsake photo soap favors: soap with your photos contained within the soap! I thought those were really cool, even though I’m not usually into arts and crafts!

The book focuses on making stunning gifts and cards with your pregnancy or baby in mind, but those are simply themes for this book; you can certainly use these instructions to make gifts and cards for many other memorable occasions. In fact, Barbara Smith’s first book in this series, The Art and Craft of Keepsake Photography: Engagements and Weddings has received rave reviews on Amazon.com. Barbara Smith specializes in creating photography-based stationery for a diverse clientele, including corporations and individuals, and teaches workshops out of her Los Angeles studio.

Baby Face is published by my favorite book publisher, Watson-Guptill. Watson-Guptill also publishes Amphoto Books, which publishes my favorite photography book, Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson, which I strongly recommend, even for beginners. Understanding Exposure is listed as a prize each month for the Photobird Photo Contest, but the winners actually get to choose a book. Winners may choose one of the books listed on the page at http://amphotobooks.com ; click the book covers and if “Amphoto” is listed under the ISBN number at the top, then the book is available as a prize. Baby Face is also available to the winners as a prize each month. Enter the contest for your chance to win Baby Face! The Photobird Photo Contest for July ends this Thursday, and the Photobird Photo Contest for August starts this Friday.

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