Russ and Gretchen Berquam sent in a great Question of the Week asking what we all do with the photographs many of us take when truck camping.
Other than entering the occasional photograph in the annual Truck Camper Magazine Calendar Contest, what do you do with your travel photography?
Here is Russ and Gretchen’s full question:
“With all the pictures taken today with digital campers, the captured images often stay on some storage device and don’t see the light of day. Gretchen alone takes about 15,000 digital photos a year.
We believe there must be a better way to display the pictures for others to see and enjoy. We are proud of the places that we have traveled and want to share our images with everyone. We also want to see them ourselves to remember our special trips. Being full-timers for over twelve years, we have come up with a few solutions that work for us.
We have made custom mats for the walls of our camper and with selected pictures from memorable or recent trips. This works for a limited number pictures.
Above: I use Photoshop Elements to make the collage. I just paste the individual pictures on the placemat and then resize them to make them fit. I usually start with the year in the center of the picture and place pictures usually chronologically clockwise around the center the center.
The best thing we have done is to make placemats with our pictures. I usually break our placemat designs down into a calendar year of travels, special event, or single trip. I have placemats for each year from 2004 through 2013 (I’m a little behind on my picture work).
Each placemat is an 11” x 17” format and laminated so we can use it as a dinner place mat on the table. The printing and laminating cost is about $7 at Office Depot.
At dinner each evening we can reminisce about that year’s travels. Many times, when we have a question of where we were on a specific year, we get our placemat and check it out.
Above: The maps on the back of the placemats are screen grabs form our Streets & Trips program. Then, I use Photoshop Elements to paste the index onto the map.
On the back of the placemat I have placed a map of our travels to help define our travels for that year. About forty to fifty small pictures will fit on a 11×17 place mat. I have tried as many as seventy, which gets very crowded.
We would like to know, “What do truck campers owners do with their travel photographs?”
Thank you, Russ and Gretchen for this great Question of the Week idea.
Click here to read the responses to this week’s QOTW.
