19 posts tagged “traveler's notebook”

In Note & Diary Style Book volume 4, a magazine I love, there are 3 pages covering how Spanish photographer Itxaso Zuñiga recorded her journey to Gobi desert in a Traveler's Notebook.  I found some interesting techniques by just looking at the way she did it and I'm sharing with you all photo journaling lovers.

1. Play with cut-out window of a page to show part(s) of a photo beneath that page.  It can be as simple as the example on page one of the magazine, but you can have a lot more fun doing something more complicated, e.g. shoot a photo from inside of a beach house looking through the windows, take another shot of the beach from outside, use the first photo with cut-out windows on a page to show part(s) of the second photo in the next page.
2. Take a lot of people photos with shallow depth of field, select one as the key image on one page, put a collage/mosaic of the rest of the people photos on the opposite page.  This creates a simple 2 pages of lives you met in your journey, which already tells a lot of the place.
3. Use the same technique above but change the topic to "Sky", "Cloud", "Flower", etc.
4. Intentionally take a lot of sky, eye-level and ground photos.  Use these stock photos to compose a collage, say 5 x 7 photos.  On the top rows you put various sky shots, on the bottom rows ground shots.  Put either one large photo of an eye-level shot or just follow the grid to fill in photos of objects/scenes/people you shot during the trip.  This creates a collage with a central theme but not as obvious because the whole collage is obscured by "background" shots.
5. To match a rough theme using a Polaroid (soon to be reproduced again!), peel off the white protective frame to make a square photo which the unexposed chemical formation can be seen on the edges.
6. Keep the words simple.  A few keywords which capture your feeling is already enough if you decide the journal is more visual.  In an example of Itxaso's page, beneath a Polaroid of the Mongolian family she wrote "Nomads Generosity Strong Hospitality Humble Pride".
7. Put glue evenly on a page and sprinkle sands and dirts on it.  You brought back a piece of the land you once walked on in the journey.  Same trick works for plants, feathers and human hairs :P

Lastly, as I often mention in our Travel Photo Cafe talks, to create a beautiful photo journal, equip yourself with a few layouts in mind before the trip, this will help you take more useful shots, collect more interesting objects and create better layouts because you are effectively stocking up useful contents all the time.

Normally I don't change gadgets as often as people thought of me, but this year I had a rewarding experience converting from Olympus E-P1 to Panasonic GF1, both micro four third cameras.

Lucky me got a Korean friend's help to get an Olympus E-P1 20% off from retail, I even made a leather strap for it myself, but soon I found the sex appeal of this PEN died off fast because of its lack of built-in flash, electronic view finder and slow focusing speed.  Having tested Panasonic's GF1 from a colleague, I decided to switch.  I sold my white PEN at a good price over Yahoo auction just when Olympus announced an upcoming E-P2.

An ex-colleague happens to work at Panasonic so I managed to get discount again while most other people are still waiting for stock to arrive.  GF1 exactly won over E-P1 for features I thought I didn't need.  Then, a few days ago Panasonic GF1 is awarded "Best of What's New" in gadget category by Popular Science.  So smooth.

In case you want to know, that leather briefcase from the first photo is from Saddleback Leather and I love it.  If you need something more modern, 78% released a series of handsome leather/canvas briefcases.

Such a beautiful event held in Tokyo!  Designphil organized to exhibit some of the 'professional users' notebooks in Spirarl Market, too bad it was just for a few days.  I'm very happy to be part of it, my previously used notebooks were shown in the exhibition, along side with a recent customization I did to the new passport size Traveler's Notebook.

I received this great sample of Traveler's Notebook passport size from Midori in end Feb 2009.  This product is to be launched in March following the success of its large size version.  I've put it into test and made some customization for the exhibition in Tokyo to be held between 19th March and 22nd March 2009 in Spiral Market.

A few things were customized in this passport size notebook: The cover was painted with UNI's POSCA marker following a theme from old Czech propaganda for fire safety.  You can see on the cover a fireman squeezing the neck of a fire chicken.  POZOR means "Attention!" in Czech.  The passport size notebook also comes in various refills for you to choose from, each version's (blank, square, ruled) refill cover resembles a typical passport cover's color.  But I didn't like the dull colors so I made my own "passport" cover out of a logo I created, the heading "UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT STATIONERY AND PHOTOGRAPHY" :).
Since Midori's Traveler's Notebook has a flexible refill system, you can add anything you like as long as the size fits.  So I made an insert full of pockets so that I can file away my collections during travel.  They are classified into 4 categories: Photografie (photograhs), Kvitance (receipts), Znamky (stamps) and Tags (well, tag).
To see what's written inside the notebook itself you have to go to see the exhibition, but here's the details of the pocket insert I made.
A "Photografie" pocket to store Fuji Instax mini sized photos.
A "Kvitance" pocket to store travel receipts.
A "Znamky" pocket to store my stamp collection.
A "Tags" pocket to store anything from luggage tag to bookmarks.

I was organizing a Travel Photo Cafe last year and made this postcard for people to pickup.  I then wrote several postcards to be sent when I was abroad.  It was June 2008 and I was too busy actually sending them so I filed them away.  Another reason why I wasn't sending them was that I wanted to send them when I would be in Germany.  So finally this year in Jan 2009 I brought them and sent from Frankfurt when I visited PaperWorld.

A trip to Tokyo is always 3 days too short.  I was going to Frankfurt and immediately Tokyo from end Jan 09 to early Feb, the trip was so compressed I could hardly breath.  Next time I should just take some extra day-offs for myself and meet some friends.  Despite economic downturn (-12.7% in Japan!), I still found a lot of great stuffs in Tokyo, perhaps we are only looking at a slow start of a collapse.  Interestingly, some company like UNI (Mitsubishi) has an interesting tag line in their internal communication, "We will not participate in recession".  How brave and confident, according to source, they did not cut back any R&D expenses because that's the most important investment to them.

I received many Xmas/New Year cards recently but these two are most amazing.

Last week I received a package from Iijima san from Midori/Designphil.  It consists of dozens of traveler's stickers, MD Paper notebooks, Traveler's Notebook filing box and postcards.  Haven't got time to report my findings here but in general the feeling is excellent, like how I can now organize my blog entries in fine papers, have a particular place to store ideas etc.

I just found that Shanti asked whether Midori's Traveler's Notebook is acid free or not in Dec 2007!  She got the notebook as a Christmas gift from her husband and wondered if the notebook can preserve her diary/writing forever.