My cousin, Christina, is an expert storyteller. She always has her camera on hand, and she is a master at finding just the right words to describe a scene. She started out making beautiful physical scrapbooks, and then transitioned to digital scrap-booking and blogging. Now, with most of family connected on Facebook, Christina uses that channel to keep us all up-to-date on the antics of her two adorable kids.
One of Christina’s favorite tools for storytelling is the photo collage. This collage was her entry into a promotional contest, which won the family a one-day pass to the Wellington Zoo.
I reached out to Christina to ask her how she did these collages, and her answer began, “First I open all the images in Photoshop…”. And, stop it right there. I know how to use Photoshop, but I’m looking for an easy, fast, foolproof way of cranking out a collage on a whim. Building them in Photoshop was not my idea of a good time.
Then, I found cf/x Collage for Mac. Eureka! It had a free trial. Even better! This program couldn’t be any simpler. Just start a new file and enter the width and height of your collage. Then, start dragging images onto the collage designer. Want to split a space and have two pictures instead of one? That’s easy. Just drag another image where you want it to go and the frame instantly splits in two. Want to adjust the dividing lines between each image, change the cropping of an image or zoom in or out? All super-easy.
So, when I ship work to a gallery, guess what comes next? I create a collage of the pieces I just shipped and I blog about it. I post it on Facebook. I send it to the gallery so they can use it for promotion. And the best part is that each one takes just minutes to create.
Each collage tells a story in a way that’s concise and nicely packaged. The collage shown below tells the story of the Studio McManus copper collection that’s available at Plum Gallery. In my opinion, it’s so much more effective to have a single collage, than to post eight individual photos.
What do you think? Do you create photo collages? What software solution do you use? Let us know your thoughts.
