Booking

The last few nights have been rather fun. After our big trip to the UK in January, we decided we wanted to preserve the photos in a more permanent way than the usual photo album or digitally on hubby's computer. We kept our eye out and got a great deal on an A3 full-colour 52-page hardcover photo book. Hubby's been slowly editing our photos as he's had time around students and decorating - helped by a "yes, yes, no, yes, no, no, yes" session when we sat down together and identified the photos we wanted to include that he then edited for us.

The last three nights, we've been putting the photo book together: hubby finishing the editing then handing the photo files over to me for upload into the photo book software. It was surprisingly easy to use and had a number of layouts and other features we could use to make the book look the way we wanted. I decided to eschew the "other features" like frames and fake photo corners etc, and just let hubby's photos speak for themselves. In the end, I also left off text, which I had originally planned to include.

Tonight, we finished it. The awesome bit was that originally I had put most of the Hogwarts/Harry Potter tour photos on two pages, and the British Museum stuff on one page. When I got to the end of the album, I had two pages unused - so I was able to insert those pages into the centre of the book and give the museum and tour a lot more space.

There is no way I could capture the British Museum in a double-page spread, so I didn't try. We were only there for a morning (we could have stayed for weeks!) and we went with a specific agenda: the Elgin marbles, the Mildenhall Treasure, and the Egyptian exhibits. We also found a lot of other cool stuff, including the Viking chess pieces and lot of wonderful Greek and Etruscan statuary, and some beautiful Venetian glass when we were trying to find the treasure. I tried to show those key things on the spread, but I will always remember the Celtic torcs and the altarpieces.... The pages showing Canterbury Cathedral and York Minster really capture the way I felt about those places, and overall I'm really happy with it. And we've got Mallard and Rocket in there, one from the National Rail Museum in York, the other from the Science Museum in London.

There was so much more we could have put in, but it's only a place of memories, to trigger our own recollections of what we did and where we went. I fired it off for printing tonight, and it will be amazing when it comes to see those photos full size - the editing program meant each page was not much more than A5 on screen. It was a lot of fun too - but so hard, deciding which of hubby's wonderful photos went in, and which ones couldn't: he had about 3000 photos from the trip, which we cut down to 300 for the album, some of which didn't make it in.... The joys of going overseas with a photographer!