A long weekend camping with friends captured in a photo book. I used My Publisher and they are definitely one of my favorite photo book companies. Their lay flat option up to 100 pages allows for more pages than most companies and the quality of their pages is fabulous! My pictures come out the way I intended – clear, vibrant and detailed.

I designed my own pages in Adobe Photoshop for more flexibility.

A couple of details that make a book easy to create:

• One digital paper style. (In this case, I used a beige digital canvas paper.)
• Stick with 2 fonts. Too many and it looks busy. ( I used American Typewriter and CK Ali’s Handwriting )
• A repeating element that is the same or similar in style. (For this book about camping, a compass made sense. I found these great varieties of compasses here and here.

I also added quotes and phrases from Ali Edwards that seemed to work with this adventure. ( Go Outside, Camping, We Word Art Brushes, This Journey Called Life )

Photographs to keep in mind while camping:

• the journey there
• the campsite
• scenic shots from a hike
• nature – plants, animals, rocks, trees, flowers
• stories of kids or adults playing – games, adventures
• discoveries – footprints, bugs, etc.
• the stars and sky
• sunrise or sunset
• the food
• evening around the campfire ( pump up your ISO and turn down your aperture)
• maps of the area
• the trip home

Here is a sampling of pages from my book:

A title page including the date of our adventure. A quote and the story.The journey there. Waiting for everyone. Learning new games and our boat. Getting seasick and a scenic shot of where we were staying. Details Activities – hiking and swimming What it looked like at night and in the morning. Learning to fish. New friendships.The big hike. Nature details along the hike and the exhaustion from the hike. The map. Napping and Fish. Sunrise. Kayaking and learning knots. The wildlife. What nighttime looks like. Our accommodations. Exploring. The journey home. Seeing whales on the way home and a quote about nature. A summary photo of the trip. The back cover. The spine detailing place and year.

Hope this inspires you to think about another photo book.