Over the Christmas period I attended a rather happy gathering of my wife’s family clan.

I wasn’t on driving duty, so for once I was able to indulge myself. Good food and wine flowed, along with numerous recounted stories of everyone’s highlights and lowlights from the recent year.

One young couple who had only recently returned from their honeymoon were proudly showing off their wedding photo album.

Usually I find wedding albums quite dull, as they are invariably carbon copies of each other – but this album was different!

Their wedding album was really cool!

Not for them the usual lines of penguin-suited members of distant family members that no one can place five years on.

Instead, their album was made up of photos of their big day, which were mainly taken by their friends, rather than a professional photographer.

This gave a rather pleasing impromptu feel to the whole album and really brought it alive.

What’s more, the album had been entirely of their own creation – in effect they had art directed and produced it themselves. It was really chic.

When I say they had produced it themselves, I found on closer interrogation that they had used an online company called Photobox to help design and compile their album.

Photobox is Europe’s leading online digital photo service with over 27 million members.

They are market leaders, passionate about the service they offer and I can see why.

They help people create memories and keep them alive through photobooks, cards, wall décor, mugs, t-shirts, and more.

In fact, that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the products and services which they offer. Using their online software (free to join) with your own personal photos you can create personalised:

• photo albums
• photo prints
• mouse mats
• coasters
• bags & t-shirts
• wall décor
• calendars & diaries

They even have a facility allowing you to share (online) your photos with distant friends and relations who want to see a record of a special event in your life, without necessarily wanting to own a physical album.

The more I look at the flexibility of their service, the more I began to see scope for money-making ideas.

Here are just a few money-making ideas that immediately spring to mind:

• ‘Then and now’ albums for villages, towns and cities – The idea here is that you find some old images which are out of copyright, depicting local scenes from a bygone era. Perhaps you can find old postcards which might fit the bill?

Scan those old pictures so that they become the ‘then’ part of your album. Your next step is to head out with your digital camera and try to track down the very same vistas.

When photographed these become the ‘now’ scenes from 2014. The more change which has occurred over the years, the more dramatic the contrast shown between the old and the new photos of the very same scene.

• A calendar tracking specific locations through the seasons – Here you can get busy photographing one specific location – possibly village scenes – through the seasons: winter, spring, summer and autumn. This kind of photographic record would be great content for calendars, postcards… perhaps Christmas cards.

Anything you create you can sell locally via street markets, local events or via local shops or corner shop adverts.

In fact, the list of possibilities for generating cash using your own photos and Photobox are endless.

These two ideas I came up with just whilst writing this newsletter.

I’ll bet that with a bit of thought you could come up with some great ideas of your own which would work equally well.