Pictures Pictures.

So I was looking through some old pictures I took, and I found some flower reasearch pictures from 2003. Alot of them came out pretty good even though I used a crappy camera. What I want to talk about right now is using pictures to give your room a little color. Nowadays it's pretty cheap and easy to get your digital images printed out. At a cost of around thirty nine cents each or two to four dollars for 100 pictures, at a 4 by 6 size, it is pretty cheap.

Take the time to look through old pictures of friends and family, and have them printed out, later on you might want to consider having them framed(or frame them yourself) to decorate your room. You can also have a calendar made out of your pictures, pretty cool eh? You can also subscribe to http://www.flickr.com and have an online gallery of pictures to share with friends and family or even the world. If you choose, you could also just have all your pictures printed out and make a photo album, memory book, or a photo journal.

Alright lets talk about printing

Printing, yes printing, anyone nowadays can do it themselves. With higher resolution stocastic inkjet printers and papers which make the colors blend seamlessly, you have your own darkroom on your desk. If youre a little crazy, you can also go real big. Eighteen by twenty four inches at your local print shop may cost you around $30.00 to $50.00, but we do live in small spaces(although sometimes bigger is better).

A few things to consider before printing:

• How much money am I willing to spend? A good budget would be at around $20 to $30. If however you do already have an inkjet(or in some cases a laser) printer, you might want to start printing out from there, the cost would almost be eliminated if youve already previously bought ink and paper.
• What will I do with the pictures? Are you making postcards, a photo album, picture displays, a picture wall, a scrapbook, a collage, a photobook, or a web gallery? Whatever it is you always want to plan a little ahead. For example, you wanted to print out a bunch of pictures to make into postcards. You were planning on just doing them at home and have all the fun there, however the ink from most inkjet printers is water soluble, which if sent to somewhere humid, the reciever might find a smudged and smeared picture.
  

Here's a few tips for longterm projects with pictures.

• The more the merrier. You really might want to consider printing out a whole selection(rolls of film, a couple of CDs or DVDs, or any other forms of portable media). Later on you might find these very useful in terms of fun and variety. Photographers could go through 9 to 50 rolls of film in a couple of hours, they have to get all of those developed(most of the time in thumbnails) to view, they choose and crop the pictures they like. You might want to do the same.
• Plan your project around flexibility and consistency. If you are making a yearly family photo album, would it be better to do it montly , bi weekly, or even daily? Consistensy is how often you would update your project. If you have pictures in a digital format, remember to back up your images, or if you have your pictures developed from film, have the film or pictures scanned to a disk. Having your pictures in multiple formats(digital and printed) would really do you good. Remember to always label CDs and create an inventory sheet of all your photographs or a contact sheet, which may come in handy later on when you want to find your pictures easily. Its also cool to keep all your digital photographs in a centralized folder and organize them by date. Try Picasa by Google, does great with organizing pictures. If youre on a Mac, use iPhoto, does a great deal with pictures too.
  
• Acid free means longer life. Remember to use acid free everything... From adhesives to paper. Post it's contain acid, and so does most glues. Elmer's glue sticks are mostly acid free. I prefer using rubber cement and spray adhesive to mount pictures. Remember to also get Ph "Neutral" tape too. Take care of those pictures.

Anyways, that's it for me at the moment, I might update this a little more sometime. If you have any comments or suggestions, just leave a comment and I'll get back to you!

Cleaning Thy Room

Have you ever thought of cleaning your room? Yesterday at 3:45pm February 13, 2006, I decided to give my room the re-arranging it so longly deserved.

Here are two things you should before you even attempt to clean your room:

• Do you have the time? Starting early is an ideal time to start, lets say at around 9:00am you start, it may take you a couple of hours to get the stuff you have cluttered in your room out and back in again. Preferably, you may want to plan ahead when doing massive clean ups.

• Do you have the storage? Most of the time, we have stuff(or crap as some people refer to it) laying all over a room just because we have no place to put it. In some instances, you might want to consider whether or not to keep the stuff in your room.

  • You may want to asses whether or not the things in your room require extra storage. Let's say for example, you have a bunch of leftover sweaters or jackets from the winter, you might want to keep them in an airtight bin for next winter and out of your closet. Or if you have an increasing number of books, would you need a new shelf, a bookcase, or another airtight bin to store them in?

  • Do you need new furniture or new ways to keep things? If the things you own outgrow the things that can keep it, you might want to find new innovative ways of keeping them, or just get new things to keep the new or old things.

Here are a few tips that may help you with cleaning your room:

• Gather cleaning tools. Most of the time, you may only need a trash bag, hamper, and a vacuum.

• Start with laundry, I think a large percentage of stuff that I cleared out of my room was laundry.

• Get your crap out of the room. Yes get it out, all of it.

• Sort the crap away from the trash. Some people like to keep things like old receipts, water bottles, scrap paper, and etc. Throw anything that you know is trash, which includes something broken that you say you might eventually fix but will never get the chance to(if you do however really plan on doing something with something, keep it and set a date).

• If your closet or drawers are not in order, start fixing them up. Hopefully you didn't put all the crap on your bed, because a lot of people like using the bed to fold their clothes.

• Start arranging your large furniture. I began by moving my bed to where I wanted it, this was because it is the most used piece of furniture in my room, second is my desk where I do some work. You really want to put the things that keep your stuff in place where they're supposed to be. If you don't, you might have a difficult time deciding where to put your stuff.

• Get all your stuff back into your rooms. Put the clothes in a drawer, put the books in a shelf; everything belongs somewhere.

After that and everything in between, you may find yourself with a cleaner, more usable room.

Dirty Room:

Clean Room:

Working on a Monday Morning

It's about 4:31am here, Im working on the layout for this new blog... Everything is going pretty well so far. I havent been on blogger for a long while so making a layout for this is getting a little more confusing. Soon, I'll have some archive links up and proper RSS icons for syndication.

Anyways, if youre reading this blog right now, please aggregate http://smallroomcoalition.blogspot.com on your favorite Atom/RSS reader. Much support would be very appreciated.

Small Room Coalition is a Go!

This is the "Small Room Coalition" a little blog started by two kids who live in small spaces. Join us as we tackle creative ways to improvise space on real tiny budgets. We might also talk about photography, traditional art, and design in general.