Yesterday in the mail, I received a package. It was from a relation of mine. Usually this relative sends a photo book at the end of each year. It cataloged the year in the life with her family and showed everything from family vacations to birthdays to holidays.  It was always a great gift and one that I looked forward to at the end of each year. Since I didn’t see them much, it was good to know what they were up to.

It’s not difficult to do this yourself for relatives that live far away and you don’t see often. It’s like a holiday newsletter but much more personal and a keepsake that you put on the shelf instead of in a box. If you’d like to do this great project all you need is inkjet photo paper, a picture editing software, a three whole punch, and some brass fasteners.

Pick out the photos you would like to use in the book and arrange them in your picture editing software. Be sure to add captions and even personalized messages in the pages! Print them out onto professional photo paper and put them in the three whole punch. After you punch the holes attach the whole thing together with the brass fasteners. Voila! You have an inexpensive, personal gift that you made yourself!

When you’re a kid and you had some sort of party, about a week after all the fun festivities were over, your mom would sit you down with a pen and a big stack of thank you notes. You had to sit there and thank everyone for coming to your party and for the gift (if any) that they brought. Well, at least I did that.

These days, I still send thank you cards. If I throw a dinner party or visit someone’s house I send a thank you card. These days, however, they don’t necessarily have to include cartoon characters and fill in the blank promptings. Now I send very personalized thank  you cards. I print out the picture on photo quality paper and mail it like a postcard! It’s really simple to do and all you need is a camera and some inkjet glossy photo paper.

It’s always nice to get this little bit of thanks in the mail. It could also work for things like small weddings, birthday parties, anniversaries, and get togethers. Thank the people you love for coming and spending time with you. It’s an important piece of etiquette that we shouldn’t let go in this modern era.

Do you love surprising your friends with little thoughtful gifts? Do you sometimes find yourself at a loss as to what you want to give out as little trinkets of your care and friendship?

Fear not, inkjet photo paper is here!

If you and your friends like to cook, why not gather some of your favorite recipes together, print them out on professional photo paper and give them to your friends as cards? This can be as simple as your favorite recipe for chicken noodle soup when your friends are sick or it can be as personal as Grandma’s secret recipe for cookies at Holiday time.

If you’ve already found the perfect gift for a friend, why not make it extra special with the wrapping paper. That’s right, I said wrapping paper. Find some of your favorite photos of the two of you or things that represent your friendship or relationship. Print them out on photo paper and use these sheets of paper to wrap the present. The sillier the picture the better and it doesn’t matter if the gift is oversized. All you need to do is tape all the sheets together until it’s a large enough sheet to use as wrapping.

Valentine’s Day is only a few days away. If you haven’t made reservations at your favorite restaurant or ordered your flowers, don’t panic. You don’t have to go out and buy chocolates or teddy bears, why not make this Valentine’s Day a special and unique day for both of you. Why not go a different route? Why do the things that everyone else does for Valentine’s Day? Why not make it your own?

This is supposed to be a day for romance, and to show that you care. You don’t have to fit the mold. Why not try to make dinner at home this year? Be romantic. Make your partner’s favorite dish. Make a photo book of your favorite memories with inkjet photo paper. Pick out the photos that represent all of the fun times that you’ve had as a couple.

If you want to go over the top, why not get a fun gift like a spa day for the two of you or a romantic vacation away. Try leaving clues around the house as a scavenger hunt. Print out pictures on matte photo paper leading your loved one around the house or apartment until they find the great, and unique Valentine’s Day gift!

My great uncle owns a small Hallmark store in Chicago. It’s one of those personally owned franchise stores and he’s worked really hard to keep it going over the years. He’s been in business for over forty years! That’s amazing for a small business owner. He credits his family for chipping in when he needed all the help he could get in the beginning, but it might be something else, too.

My great uncle is a smart man. When he began his business over forty years ago, he had a great mind for advertising. He printed up flyers on matte paper and put them on cars to announce sales, specials, and holiday deals. He plastered them all over the little town of Aurora, Illinois, and people came! But he didn’t stop there. During the winter holidays (arguably the busiest time for Hallmark) he would use large format paper to print huge banners for the front of his store or inside the store to mark the ornament section or the holiday cards. He usually let his daughter (who the store is named after) color little pictures on the banners just to add a little touch of holiday family love into it.

So yes, the entrepreneurship of my great uncle is to be celebrated. He’s a smart businessman, but he also needed the help of paper to get him there.

When I was in high school, each and every one of my classrooms were equipped with an overhead projector. Teachers would print out pictures, graphs, and diagrams from the textbook or other places on transparency film. They would then be able to show the entire class and write on the diagram etc, for everyone to see.

This was particularly wonderful for students like me who are visual learners. Studies have actually shown that 83 percent of human learning is visually based. This was the learning method used in most of my classes in school. It did a lot of my fellow classmates well. That’s not to say that we weren’t exposed to other sorts of learning like auditory (lecturing), but we didn’t seem to respond as well to that.

Times are changing. Classrooms no longer have overhead projectors in them unless it’s a very antiquated system. Nowadays, teachers use visual aids printed on large format paper or handouts in full color on professional photo paper. The days of transparency paper are far behind us, but the way that people are learning is still very visual.

This is why it’s very important for teachers to recognize this and use quality materials to use in their classrooms.

If you’ve gone through the trouble of picking out the best professional photo paper and printed it out in stunningly beautiful high quality, why should you let it languish in a drawer or a barely opened photo album? If you take a great picture of your family or a sunset that you absolutely love, you should display it! It should be in a frame in the living room or the hallway.

There’s no reason you need to take it to a store to get framed and matted. You can do this yourself! Don’t believe me? Here’s how easy it is. Grab yourself a mat. This is basically a sturdy piece of cardboard that is usually colored on one side. It’s like a really thick cardstock. Take your photo (which you printed on photo quality paper, right?) and measure it. You want your mat to cover a little bit of the photo, maybe about a quarter of an inch on each edge should be covered. So when you measure the mat, make it about a quarter of an inch SMALLER on each edge. Draw your lines and use a ruler to make sure they’re absolutely straight. Then punch a hole in the middle of the piece you’re going to remove and cut it out carefully using an exacto knife. See? You’ve made a mat! Now that photo will look great hanging on the wall where it belongs.

Scrapbooking can sometimes be a very intense sort of hobby. It’s the kind of hobby that some people go a little over the top about. However, this isn’t really a bad thing. Scrapbooks are great ways to preserve memories and recap a year or specific event. They’re also a great deal of fun.

For those people that do go slightly overboard with their hobby, they only use the absolute best products. They’ve been around the block and know the tried and true products that will make their scrapbook head and shoulders better than the last.

They know that photo quality paper is one of the most important pieces of any scrapbooker’s arsenal. This is especially true when you are printing your own photographs. You should try to look for professional photo paper to give you the best results.

Pictures are the backbone of a scrapbook. Without them, you have nothing but stickers, captions, and descriptions. What is the point of having all of those wonderful ballerina teddy bear stickers if you don’t have any photographs of your daughter’s ballet recital to adorn the pages?

Because you are going to want the absolute best quality products, you should try out professional photo paper.

On my commute every day, I pass some beautiful scenery. From the Staten Island ferry, I see the Statue of Liberty, the Manhattan Skyline, numerous bridges, and boats. It wasn’t until recently however, that I decided that I should document all of these.

With my simple camera phone I was able to snap photos of beautiful scenery and images. But now that I had literally hundreds of photos (like I said, I see these things every day) what should I do with them? Well, of course I decided to print them on photo quality paper and hang them in my living room.

You can do the same thing. All you need is a camera, a printer, some inkjet photo paper, and a gorgeous subject. Once you’ve got the photos printed, you can mat and frame them. Then distribute them throughout your home or keep them all together to make a great collage.

Even if your commute is long, arduous, and frustrating sometimes, you should still appreciate the beauty in it. If you can remember the gorgeous sunset behind the Statue of Liberty rather than the mean woman who elbowed you trying to get off the ferry, you’ll be a much happier person.

For a long time now I have wanted a print of my friend’s photography. She takes fantastic panoramic photos of my hometown. They make me feel a little nostalgic and homesick. They’re absolutely gorgeous. However, she is an absolute perfectionist and refuses to print any of her panoramic photos until she has found the right type of paper for them. A while back, she tried professional photo paper but didn’t enjoy the quality. Then she found luster photo paper.

This paper is absolutely perfect for large format prints of photography, especially panoramic photos. This is because the paper is a little thicker. It doesn’t curl as much when saturated with ink like other types of thinner paper do. If you have a great printer that has good rollers on it, you can print without any curl at all!

Luster photo paper also comes with a pebbled finish to hide fingerprints and other smudges that are put on the photo after printing. During printing, these little pebbled marks are intended to help the ink saturate the paper at a faster rate so as to dry faster. This decreases the chances of the ink smudging while printing.

Luster photo paper is absolutely phenomenal for large scale panoramic prints.