Scrapbooking Traveler

Many years ago, I fell in love with the business end of a camera. As a child, I set up a dark room in my parents' kitchen and was lucky enough to attend a high school that offered photography and yearbook classes as electives, along with a workstudy program in offset printing. I learned how to put the science together with the art of composing photos and layouts that are both compelling and pleasing to the human eye.

Then my children came along and like any good parent, I created baby books and photo albums. Not content to just add photos to those old magnetic-page albums, I scouted magazines and old books and ephemera to cut out little embellishments for the pages. With a tiny pair of scissors, I practiced scherenschnitte to create my own little stickers and borders for the pages. Fast forward 25 years and the scrapbooking industry is in full swing with hundreds of thousands of embellishments, cutting and embossing systems, inks and stamps, fibers and brads, all available for purchase by the leisure crafter. Like quilting bees of old, ladies now get together at "crops" to share stories as they cut and paste beautiful albums of their favorite photos. While the younger women are busy creating memory books of their childrens' first day at school, soccer games and sleepovers, many of us are also documenting our travels.

This week, I just finished an album that displays all the fun, romance and nature we encountered on our Star Flyer cruise from this past December. We have photos of our land tours of the Espiritu Santo Coffee Plantation where Calvin got to strap on a harvet basket and actually pick ripe coffee "cherries." We enjoyed petite cups of the plantations best freshly-brewed organic coffee, so I took pictures of the little coffee cups. We toured the plantation owers' residence (a rustic two-room shack with cast iron stove and no plumbing), the weighing and sorting equipment, painted oxcarts, and terraced rows of coffee plants under a canopy of shade trees. Everywhere we looked, there were opportunities to make beautiful photographs, and that was just our first tour of the day. A wooden bead and basket factory tour followed, including the water wheel that powered the saw mill. On to Sarchi where we saw the largest painted oxcart in the world, as verified by Guiness Book. Marvelous! Centuries-old churches, a handcrafted nativity scene in the village's central park, and local Ticos (Costa Ricans) all provided many opportunities to make pictures. Traveling to new worlds is an opportunity to see how other people live, and photographs help you remember when you return home.

Sailing on the clipper ship is an experience everyone should have at least once in their lives. Especially on relatively calm seas in a tropical climate, sailing is easy when strong young men in striped sailor shirts take care of all the work of raising the sails and tying them off. For a photographer, the 21 sails, ships wheel and nautical compass make excellent subject matter. For a traveler, there is nothing more relaxing that watching the moon and the stars glide by as the sails gently sigh and clap. Day or night, passengers can relax with a boat drink and a good book, visit with fellow travelers, eat fabulous meals and plan the shore excursion at the next port of call. With a digital camera, you can spend a whole afternoon making detailed photos of ropes and sails, nautical equipment and beautiful scenery of the beaches and hills over the rail as your ship rolls by.

On this Costa Rican cruise, each time we went ashore, there was a "wet landing." This means we took a zodiac raft to the beach and jumped out into water about two feet deep. Fun! We were prepared with an underwater case for our camera that kept it from drowning. We used it while snorkeling, and also out of the water for photos of interesting rocks and shells that we wanted to remember but not cart home. A waterproof case also floats, so if you happen to drop it off your kayak while getting video of two fighting iguanas, you don't have to jump into the river with the crocodiles to retrieve it. Bonus!

Here are my recommendations:
1. Travel.
2. Enjoy.
3. Take plenty of photos.
4. Come home and re-live your trip as you scrapbook your adventures.