Capturing Memories: Your Family Story in Photographs

by Maureen A. Taylor

Author Maureen Taylor starts at frame one, reviewing gear and gadgets for both film and digital cameras (including digital video and printers) and giving photographers helpful (and $-saving) tips on what and how to buy. Then its on to taking pictures, with practical advice on improving photo composition, avoiding common errors, lighting, backgrounds, and even how to keep the photographer from getting left out of all the pictures. She also touches on topics of particular interest to family historians, such as photographing gravestones, family heirlooms, and old documents, as well as ethical and legal concerns when posting photographs on the Internet. Throughout, Taylor emphasizes how family photographers can take advantage of new technology and websites to get family photos out of the shoebox and into the hands of people who will love them as much as they do.

163 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2008

About the author

Maureen Taylor is a frequent keynote speaker on photo identification, photograph preservation, and family history at historical and genealogical societies, museums, conferences, libraries, and other organizations across the U.S., London and Canada. She’s the author of several books and hundreds of articles and her television appearances include The View and The Today Show (where she researched and presented a complete family tree for host Meredith Vieira). She’s been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, The Boston Globe, Martha Stewart Living, Germany’s top newspaper Der Spiegel, American Spirit, and The New York Times. Maureen was recently a spokesperson and photograph expert for MyHeritage.com, an internationally known family history website and also writes guidebooks, scholarly articles and online columns for such media as Smithsonian.com.

Currently a contributing editor of Family Tree Magazine, Maureen also writes personal memoirs and narrative family histories for the Newbury St. Press of the New England Historic Genealogical Society.

Reviews

[Sharil · Rating 4 out of 5]

I checked out this book from the local library. My focus is genealogy. Most of this book deals with capturing current memories. It has chapters on selecting/features of film cameras, digital cameras and printers along with advice on taking photos and some creative ideas.

The genealogy aspect is a bit "brief" with ideas about how to photograph heirlooms and documents. Of course, now printer/scanners are much more advanced and so you would scan any documents you could.

It does place a great deal of emphasis on labeling photos, which most people fail to ndo. What is the value of any photo that doesn't have at least a year, names of the subject or place? I have done a lot of photo scanning and am very consistent about how I label my photos, but have struggled with a way to capture more information. This book does mention the freeware, FotoTagger, and suggests it is much friendlier to use for tagging than Adobe PhotoShop. Even though this book is now "old" by digital information standards, the book is "right on" with the FotoTagger software. I went out and read reviews online and see the value of the software. I am going to do more software investigation for adding metadata to photos, particularly my historical ones, so this part of the book has given me a great start.

I think this book had some good ideas and is a great start for anyone who is new to taking photographs and wants to start taking better photos of family. It gives a good, condensed overview for considerations regarding purchasing cameras and printers, but you can easily find this information online and current reviews of features and products available.

Most valuable piece of information for me: TIFF versus JPEG files. If I ever knew the difference, the information was lost. I am going to have to re-think whether I want to scan photos as TIFF instead of JPEG and check to see if my old, but advanced scanner software gives that option.