Do you scrap these photos?

The "background noise" is what i cherish in all photos. People rarely change that much physically, the background is always evolving through time.

YEP! We're SLOWLY renovating an old farm house. There is no room and things are constantly cluttered and moved around and piled up as things don't have homes yet and other things have to be moved for projects. I wouldn't have anything scrapped if I let the backgrounds get in the way.

Nothing new to add. I would definitely scrap that photo. He is so cute and obviously there is a story to tell about this pic.

I would approach scrapping the original in a couple of ways:

1. scrap the photo as is. If you don't want some of the background to show, then layer something over that part of the photo, just like you would on the sky in a landscape photo, KWIM? What you overlap might be a journaling card, an icon, some washi tape, whatever: just cover up the part of the photo that is not part of your story. If you think of the background "noise" as part of the background to your story, then leave it out in the open.

2. crop the photo to leave your ds, but literally cut away the extraneous background. Now you will have a smaller sized photo to scrap, but there are lots of samples of small photos on whole big sb pages all over the place now.

OR... you could take the time to scan the photo & edit either at home or at a photo kiosk, and do the cropping and enlarge just the part of the photo you want to focus on.

A few years ago, when it was still the original 2Peas site, I had made and posted a layout in the gallery with an old 1970s picture of me as a teenager. The fun part was that the layout wasn't about me at all, it was all about the background things you saw in the picture. I had titled it "70s style". I had placed little numbers on the different elements and journaled about them. There was wood paneling, orange-y flowered couch, my hair was very dark long, straight and parted in the middle (à la Cher), my uncle had plaid pants...you get the picture. Style change, things we grew up with change, how fun it is to look back and have a few smiles, or even laugh, at how we ever lived with orange and brown shag carpeting.
All that to say that, yes, I would scrap that photo and not change a thing.

Like others have mentioned, the background stuff is meaningful to me. I recently scrapped a picture from my kids' younger years and all three of us felt nostalgic when we talked about the miscellaneous things we noticed. Simple things that others might not even notice. In the picture the kids are in the kitchen. The tree they used to climb is visible through the window. We remembered how we loved that house. Even the bowls that we used to have that were drying in the sink and random things on the counter reminded us about our life at that time. All that background stuff was a part of your life at some point. You'll enjoy seeing it someday and IMO scrapping "perfect" pictures is more for people who get paid to scrap or maybe for those who do it more for art than memory keeping.

Yes! what I plan to do with photos like that from my childhood and early adulthood is to scan them first and enlarge the more favorable portions. Then I'll scrap both photos, the original and the enlargement, next to each other.

That is the sort of stuff that marks that photo to a certain time period. I make sure to leave some of that stuff in my albums. I love looking at that sort of stuff in the few photos I have from my childhood.

But after saying that, I will enlarge and crop some photos. It just depends on my mood.

Your background is not that bad. I did not even notice it when looking at the pic. That said, I agree that it is fun to see what used to be AND you could crop it or blur or eliminate the background.

This is me exactly. I think there's a place for the background in some photos and in others it's just a distraction.

I have done pages where I've focused on the background things. I have a very non-descript photo of my Mum in the kitchen where she's not looking at the camera. The layout actually focuses on the things around her, like the local milk carton which has long been out of production but had all the letters from A-Z printed in the wording and we would race to complete the alphabet during breakfast, or the dishes, and the little window where the baker would drop the bread in my dad's childhood.

Love this idea!SaveSave

I love crap photos! I take lots of crap photos! I know design team members use the best photos or manufacturers use stock photos to showcase product. Yet, my eye is always drawn to photos first. My first thought after seeing all this new product showcased on one layout after another? Those photos are so boring because of no background and perfect smiling people.

I notice new products when it's in the form of a card or paper craft.