Barber shop scrapbook pages

I don't consider myself a scrapbooker, but I do enjoy paper crafts. I have good intentions of making scrapbooks but we all know what happens with good intentions. I put together a book for my older son a few years ago, from birth through the high school with a few photos of him as a Marine which happened a few years later. My younger son's book is still stuck on preschool pages.

My daughter-in-law got a small book last year on Mother's day, but that was easy to compile with her pregnancy photos and Colton's baby photos for those two months. The intended scrapbook for me is still in my head except for two pages recently completed, dedicated to Colton's first haircut which I wrote about here.

Here is the two page layout as the pages will appear in the album, followed by close ups of the single pages.

 I love photographs and some of the sample pages I've seen in stores seem to feature embellishments to the point of photos being secondary to the completed page. I think striking a balance is going to be a challenge for me. Still, getting anything on a page and into an album is progress and there certainly is no right or wrong to this.

If you indulge in this hobby, what are your words of advice? I mean on anything and everything from composition to which adhesive you prefer and why. Also, how do you photograph a flat page without the distortion I am showing in these? I am thinking I needed to have the camera higher and centered over the subject.