Pets are an important part of peoples’ lives. It only makes sense that pet owners would want to include the pets in scrapbooks.

My favorite furry friend is a cat named Jeepers. He was named as a tribute to his birthplace: a jeep on the lot of a local car dealer. I inherited him, quite by accident, five years ago at a hair appointment. He has become such a source of love and laughter in my life that I can’t imagine a scrapbook without him.

Capturing candid photos of a favorite pet can be a challenge. If your dog or cat has a favorite toy, it can be put to good use to orchestrate great pet photos. Enlist a friend’s help to stand behind you and hold your dog’s favorite ball, resting it on your shoulder. It is easy to snap photos of an alert pooch that is sitting still and appears to be staring directly into the camera you are holding.

In order to get great shots of pets in mid-air, jumping or running, check out the settings on your camera. Many cameras now have special settings, including one that is designed to capture action shots. Once you position the camera to that setting, you can snap photos of a dog running, a cat pouncing or a bird flying without worrying about such things as aperture and F-stops.

Another common concern when taking pet photos is background clutter. It’s easy to accidentally include table legs, tree trunks and the legs and feet of two-legged friends as well. Many of these photos can be saved with some creative cropping, where the distracting background is trimmed away, leaving smaller photos that feature your four-legged friends in all their glory.

Once you have accumulated great photos of your pet, there are many choices for how to include them in your scrapbook. You can even include photos of their favorite toys. After arranging Jeepers’ favorite toys, I photocopied the resulting photo onto a sheet of vellum that I trimmed to create a band at the bottom of the page.

This vellum border is fastened to the page with a vellum grass sticker strip at the bottom and a colored brad at each top corner. Many of the cropped photos are inserted into a clear, 2-by-2-inch mini-book that holds several photos and 2-inch squares of red paper for journaling or telling the story behind the photos. A cropped photo becomes the cover for this mini-book that is then attached to the scrapbook page. The page is completed with vellum letters that spell out his name, accompanied by a cropped photo of his toy fish.

Whether you create special pint-size books of your pint-size friends or feature them in the pages of your larger family album, their unique personalities will be saved and enjoyed for years to come.