Photos After A Trip

One of the first things I do after I get home from a trip is to download all the photos I took, getting Bryan to download his as well. I then put them into a folder with the date and name of the destination and file it all into the Master Folder where I keep all my pictures.

For this most recent trip, we had arranged to create a Google Drive to be able to share our photos with everybody on the expedition, so my next task was to take a copy of all our photos and go through them to weed out the undesirable ones (out of focus, caught my thumb, multiple shots of the same thing, embarrassing facial expressions, etc…) and upload them onto the Google Drive to share with everyone. Once that was done, I went through the photos from all the other members of the expedition and downloaded the ones I wanted, saving them into their own folder inside the Master Folder holding my own pictures.

Then I created a copy of my own pictures and went through them all, picking out the ones that encapsulated the highlights of our trip – roughly 10 for our week in the rental car and another 10 or so on the Earthwatch Expedition. These were then posted on Facebook to give people a taste of what our trip was like.

Creating the posts for my blog required a bit more work. I created yet another copy of all my photos and then weeded through them all to come up with two or three photos from each event/place we’d been to. I then started in on the narrative, researching on the internet to find the specifics of each place. I ended up with one post on the week in our rental car, one post on the Expedition we were on, one post on all the food we ate while we were there (the food was so good I just had to highlight it all), one post with book recommendations that the Lead Scientist had made, and one post on the Foodie Tour we’d taken.

I decided to create two photo books this time, since it really was like two separate vacations: one for the Earthwatch Expedition and one for the week in our rental car. That required yet another copy of all the photos that needed to be weeded through yet again, to ensure that I got the best photos to create the narrative I was going for in each book. Thankfully I’d done most of the research already for the blog posts, but there were a couple items that required more information. I organized the photos by date and then put them into subfolders by event. Arranging them all into the program that creates the books for me took several weeks, to ensure that it was just right and that I had no grammatical or spelling errors. A click of the button had them both ordered, and they are now sitting proudly on my shelf ready for whomever wishes to look through them.

Once that was taken care of, I then had to create – you guessed it – ANOTHER copy of all our photos, this time going through them to find the perfect ones to update my Power-Point Presentation. I am scheduled to give a talk on our trip on the last Saturday of October to my sister’s church group. It’s a potluck as well, so I not only get to talk about my favorite subject, but I also get to eat lots of delicious food!

My final task pertaining to the photographs is to create a set of pictures to host a Family Movie Night so we can show our families all the (best) pictures of our Iceland trip. I probably work on that tomorrow, while he watches the football game.