I’ve got a little grunge polaroid frame for you today.  It’s 300 dpi, in .png format and approx. 3″ x 3.5″  Open in photoshop and crop one of your photos square, then slide it onto a layer underneath the frame and resize if necessary.

Download link below preview:

Download the polaroid frame here.

* feel free to use this commercially for your client’s photos or layouts in albums, please do not redistribute/claim as your own/ or sell.  Please direct people to the blog here to download it.

* Thanks, enjoy and have a great Thanksgiving weekend!

This weekend kicks off the holiday season.  I love this time of year.  Here in southwest Florida the bugs slowly start to dwindle away, the air is cooler, it’s less humid, and you WANT to be outside every chance you get.  I also love all of the photo opportunities this time of year….from family, to food, to decorations.  There’s so much I want to capture!

I hope you and your family have a great Thanksgiving weekend, eat lots of turkey and goodies…remember, calories don’t count on holidays!

Here’s a little inspiration from Flickr for you…

1. …, 2. HBW!, 3. ☆ white Xmas tree ☆, 4. Snow at the North Pole, 5. one h ᵉ α r t… one w ᴼ r ℓ ∂, 6. Santa’s Cheer, 7. Frosty the Snowman, 8. Christmas Tree / Village in Rothenberg ob der Tauber, Germany, 9. merry, 10. I see stars, 11. Merry Christmas…, 12. Golden Christmas, 13. Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, 14. O.K. Just One More, 15. sigh., 16. the lost christmas tree – part III : rebirth

So technically I’m not old at 35….but I certainly feel old after my trip to Walgreens the other day. I got carded.  Usually, everyone’s first thought at getting carded is, I’m so glad I don’t look my age!

Anyway, I handed over my drivers license to the girl behind the counter. She looked at it and said, “WOW!”. It was a pretty enthusiastic wow I must say. Then she paused (she paused!). I guess she realized what she had just said and added, “You don’t look that OLD.” Ok, so she tried to turn it into a compliment, but I did want to come across the counter and ring her little neck anyway. Of course, she was young…maybe 18 if she was lucky. And anyone her own age was probably born in the 1980’s. So seeing an ID with the numbers 1974 on it, was probably pretty foreign to her.

And now, time to make YOU feel old. The movie, The Craft came out the year I got married (1996), and if you’re a fan of The Mentalist that’s on TV now, then you’ll recognize Robin Tunney.

It’s funny when I get together with all my flickr photog friends at our meet ups, everyone is different ages.  We talk about film cameras.  That’s what I grew up with, that’s what I learned on.  But, there are photogs in the group that NEVER used film cameras.  That is foreign to me.  I can’t imagine NOT starting out with a film camera.  You learned about fstops and shutter speeds quickly, because if you didn’t, when you got your film developed, you’d spend money to get lousy photos.  And you never knew if they were lousy or not until you got the actual photographs back…you couldn’t just look at an LCD screen on the back of the camera to see if you got it right.

Here’s a little trip down memory lane for those of you that used to shoot film!

1. Le Clic Camera, 2. 365.77 found film, 3. Canon AE-1 Program w/FD 50mm F1.4 Lens, 4. Polaroid 1000 Camera, 1977, 5. Negative film from my childhood Kodak Disk Camera, 6. Will Films Ever Return?, 7. Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera, 8. Kodak Instamatic 124 + Flash Cube (365.128), 9. INSTAMATIC WITH FLASH CUBES

I’ve had the LeClic camera, I’ve had cameras that took 110 film, and the camera that started it all was the Canon F1.  After the F1 I moved on to the Canon ElanII 35mm, then the original Digital Rebel (which my brother now has), then the XTi and now the 50D.  My how things have changed…and after that last statement…I now sound old!

Here’s two older scanned shots taken with the Canon ElanII 35mm camera…

I love this one…this was before sunflares were cool, lol

Remember the old film cameras that had panoramic mode? You’d get your photos back in this HUGE folder, remember that? I had one too…

My brother with my old Digital Rebel that I gave him after I got the 50D.  He’s patiently waiting for me to get the 5D Mark II so that I can give him the XTi.  The XTi is the back up right now for the 50D…so it’s not going anywhere till the 5D comes, and as much as I wish Santa would bring it this year…I don’t think it’s going to happen…hopefully soon

I’ll have to do some digging to locate some of my old scanned photos from the Canon F1 but in the meantime, here’s a few taken with the original Digital Rebel…

One of my FIRST photos taken right after I got the Digital Rebel:

And a few others:

The horse and rider were fine after this shot.

I’m not a ‘film snob’, that’s for sure. I’m digital all the way. If they would have had digital cameras when I was a kid, I would have owned one for sure. I wouldn’t of had to mow so many lawns or feed/clean neighbor’s horses to afford film developing! BUT…I wouldn’t have learned so much early on about photography if I hadn’t had those film cameras.  Those film cameras have certainly made me appreciate the digitals!

Thanks for taking this trip down memory lane with me!

I don’t have the best photo back up system in the world, I just have a large external hard drive.  I can’t quite afford a better system right now.  But what I do….is at least try to burn everything to data DVD’s.  I keep them in a huge DVD case…in case of emergency I can just grab the case and go, lol.

So, as I back up older photos today…I’ve gone through a few and posted some on flickr.  Here’s a couple for you:

A Roseate Spoonbill taking off at Ding Darling on Sanibel Island this past October…

A Great Egret with a little lunch at Ding Darling on Sanibel Island this past October…

If you’ve got any suggestions for archiving photos, or want to tell me how you protect your images, feel free to post a comment here!