Using Lightboxes For Collaborative Work

I am an author of Children’s Story Books. My books consist of mainly photo illustrations of which I shoot myself and/or use royalty free illustrations supplied by Dreamstime.com. As a Children’s Book author, I develop most of my stories over time with many thought provoking spurts throughout a day, week, or month. These thought provoking spurts include deciding what illustrations I may need for the story line.

These thoughts may or may not be part of the final book, but I need a process of remembering these illustrations that come to mind so that I can formulate the completion of the book with all of my thoughts that I have accumulated throughout the book creation process.

Me, along with most humans, often think of great ideas at a certain point of time and then, later, forget the idea completely or the idea does not have the same impact that it had when first thought and therefore may become irrelevant when that thought would have been a very important part of the final process.

This is where Dreamstime Lightbox comes into play. This feature allows me to “bring back’ those thoughts/illustrations that I once felt were instrumental for my book line. So, let me explain how Lightbox is instrumental for me and my book writing. As I am developing my stories, I picture what illustrations I am looking for. This is actually what you would call “brain storming” sessions and as I mentioned these sessions can be by the minute, hour day(s), week(s), etc. I go to my Dreamstime account and start searching for relevant illustrations that I think may work for my story. Once I find an illustration, I immediately place it in my Lightbox. (examples of some of the images I have used in my books are image 7012066, 7011975, 7238428, 46779414 and 36218161) I continue to work this process until I feel that I have exhausted all possible illustrations for the book story. Granted, I will not be using all of the illustrations in my Lightbox, but it is the “vessel” for my spur of the moment thoughts. I know that with these illustrations in the Lightbox, I will at least be reminded of what my first thoughts were in using the illustration(s).

If I did not put the thought provoking illustrations in the Lightbox, I would surely have forgotten about them when it came to actually assembling the story. I could be missing a point in my story that could make or break the entire book with a forgotten, but very important illustration. Of course, not all of the illustrations I put in Lightbox will be used in the final book, but I may just discard those that just are not used to make the book, or just keep them there in case they might possibly be useful in my next books. Another point I would like to make is that there are so many wonderful illustrations available on Dreamstime that Lightbox makes a very good “think tank” file cabinet. When I come upon a useful illustration, I am thankful that there is a feature such as Lightbox to store them for me because searching and finding that particular illustration or illustrations that you may have found last week can be difficult to find again.

There are thousands of illustrations available at Dreamstime, and for me, time is money so I do not have or want to invest a whole lot of time trying to backtrack searching for that special illustration when all I need to do is put it/them in my Lightbox when I first find them. I label my lightbox for each book idea. Lightbox for me, is a great tool in my business of book creations and I am sure that whatever project or endeavor that you are working on, Lightbox will become a very valuable tool for you too. Start using Lightbox; you will be glad you did. Thanks for listening and hope the best for you with using your Lightbox for your needs. RJHutchinson, Children’s Book Author.