The first step in documenting any incredible adventure is buying a great camera that will ensure you capture every magical moment. But once you’ve snapped your amazing photos, you can enhance your memories by creating an enviable scrapbook that celebrates your travels. These tips will help you display your amazing journeys.
Map out your journey
For Nancy’s trip to Kyoto, Japan, she incorporated maps from the places she visited to give her scrapbook a sense of place. She used them as background paper, displaying specific sections on the page as well as cutting them up to frame her photos. For road trippers and backpackers, who are constantly on the go, they’re also a great way to chart your journey by displaying your routes with colourful pens or thread. Try highlighting a photo from each destination that captures the essence of your experience there. If you’re working through multiple items of a bucket list, collect maps of all the places you wish to visit in order to create a visual guide of your checklist.
Write down impressions of your travels
Nothing captures the moment better than a perfect photo, but written words, impressions, stories, and itineraries can flesh out an experience. Nancy’s top bucket list item was visiting family she had never met in Japan, and to keep track of all of her experiences she was constantly jotting things down while travelling. It’s easy to get wrapped up in such an experience and forget to record everything, so after your adventure be sure to sit down and write out anything else that comes to mind. You can take those pages and directly cut and paste them into your scrapbook, but another great option is to use photo-editing software to impose simple written impressions onto your photos. It’s the perfect combination of images and words to encapsulate a travel experience. When visiting distant family is topping your bucket list, try creating a physical photo album of shots for yourself and a digital version to share with those overseas.
Pair scenic wide shots with portraits
Beautiful vista shots captured the panoramic beauty of every location visited in Japan. Nancy’s fun, whimsical close-up shots of friends and family displayed the spirit of the adventure and highlighted how much everybody enjoyed the trip. On your scrapbooking pages, combine the two types of photos for every location you’re documenting. It will help you remember not only how everything looked, but also what it was like to experience it. If you’re comfortable with photo-editing programs try overlapping or blending sections of the two types of pictures together.
Experiment with digital photo merging and manipulation
You’ll need to be a little technically savvy for this one—or at least enlist the help of someone who is—but with all of the great photo-editing software available, it’s worth playing around with your photos to see how you can combine and enhance them in innovative ways to take your scrapbook to the next level. Try making digital collages of tons of photo moments from the same event or location. Play with merging daytime and nighttime shots together for cool depictions of a locale. Old fashioned cutting and pasting are still fantastic, but there’s a limit to how much you can do. With digital manipulation there are endless exciting ways to translate the emotions behind your photos into the photos themselves!
Incorporate mementos
A photo scrapbook is really a very organized memory box for documenting your bucket list items, so utilizing mementos from your travels enhances the project. While on your adventure, collect little things that have significance for you—tickets stubs from plays you watched or museums you visited, clippings from local newspapers, menus from your favourite takeout joint. When you’re assembling your scrapbook, use these items to build on the photo story you’re already telling. Try focusing on mementos that recall powerful sensory experiences to complement your incredible visuals. Use pressed flowers from the sweet-smelling forests you hiked through, napkins from the bakery with the doughnuts that melted in your mouth, or a flyer from the summer festival that rocked your eardrums. Whether it’s visiting family in Japan or any other trip you may take, leave some room in your bag to bring these mementos back with you.