Hi, it’s Tracie and I’m talking about minimalist scrapbooking again. But this time I want to focus a bit on the photos. I have found the key to helping me be successful with my minimalist albums is taking my photos with intention. And my favorite way to do that is to make sure that I have negative space to work with within my photos. Photos with negative space for word art or journaling allow you to use your photo as the base for your page, requiring minimal elements to complete your page.

I’m currently working on my travel album for our trip to California this summer and below are some examples from my album so far.

Some photos with negative space can be used in a pretty straight forward manner, like this…

I just used the space to the right of the subject (my spritz!) to add some paint and stickers from Traci’s Sunkissed collection.

I do a lot of pages like this, but it’s also fun to play around with the negative space that you have and get creative with it!

In order to catch our train coming into the station and have some negative space to work with, I shot my photo at an angle.

I used word art from Traci’s Weekender collection to fill some of the space above the train (and chose these specifically to mimic the blockiness of the train). The angle of this photo not only gave me sky to work with, it also created a great slice of the platform to work with. I made a custom text box to fit the space and added my journaling.

For this last page, I was actually a little annoyed with myself for having that palm tree in the background split my page in two like it did. But instead of getting upset, I got creative with it and decided to use it as a design element.

I lined up a stamp from Traci’s Ex Libris Galaxias on one side of the palm tree with the journaling about the books on the other side.

I’m still a work in progress when it comes to setting up my shots for my more minimalist style albums, but I’m getting better at it. Once you get started, it is so much fun to create your negative spaces and then decide how to use them!