Week 307-309 - Creating the Travelogue - 07-15-2012

Creating the Complete Travelogue

- Part 4 of 4

In the past three travelogues about travelogues, we discussed choosing your interesting topic, selecting your presentation method and photo editing. In this final week we discuss all the steps that we use to create our email-based travelogues. We have chosen to just to outline the steps with some notes but not present all the technical details you would need to duplicate our efforts. If anyone is crazy enough to want to do as we have, feel free to reply and asked for more specifics.

1. Choose your topics(s).

Our first choice for a topic is the people and places we experienced for that week. This worked great for the first few years. In recent years we have revisited a number of places and thus there is nothing new and fresh to present. This is especially true when we return home for weeks or months. Our second choice is to do a more thorough travelogue on a subject that we just touched on. A good example is Arches National Monument. Our first mention of Arches had only two pictures as that week we visited Arches one day and spent six days elsewhere. A later travelogue dedicated to Arches had 24 photos and a map of the park. Our third choice is a photo collection, with photos that might come from any number of different weeks. An example is our Sunrise & Sunset Photo Collection. Finding these photos can be a challenge and we'll explain our technique later in this travelogue. And our final choice is just make up something, like a travelogue about travelogues!

2. Copy all photos to work directory.

Do this to protect your photos from mutilation in the following steps.

3. Cull photos, that is, remove the ones you don't want.

When you are dealing with hundreds of photos for a week, deleting the ones you don't is far quicker than copying the ones you do want from one directory to another.

4. Resize your photos.

The current maximum width we display is 900 pixels. Our original photos are 3072 pixels wide (7mb). A 900 width photo is less than 1mb . Reducing the size now makes all your work go faster. We use a free program Visualizer Photo Resize to shrink all the photos in the work directory.

5. Edit the Photos:

Now we are down to 20 to 30 smaller photos in our work directory. We load all these photos in to Paint Shop Pro (By the way, in the last week we finally upgraded our version 9 Paint Shop Pro to the most current version X4. It is a good version.) For editing techniques, see last weeks travelogue and then experiment for a few years!

6. When editing is complete, for each photo we insert it into bordered frames.

There are many fancy treatments you can do to your photos. A 2-4 pixel wide border is a quick step that enhances the look greatly. We have 1, 2, 3 and 4 pre-made frames to insert our photos into. Then, we save each photo in the sequence we will use it, e.g file names W307-01, W307-02 ... W307-20 (W=week 307=week number 01...20=the photo number).

7. Finally, create the email.

We copy our email from the previous week to get the list of addresses or you could send it to a "mailing list". We prefer the copy as we then know exactly who received each email. Insert each photo in sequence into your email.

8. Now it's time to write your story.

It's easy, as the photos lead the way. We tend to introduce the topic with a few paragraphs and then put a short caption on each photo. However, at times our main story is spread across many photos.

9. Okay, it's done! But, it is really nice to have good English! So proofread it and then have someone with good grammar do the same.

10. That's it, send it and be sure to save a copy for yourself.

We send the email to ourselves as To: and to everyone else as Bcc: (Blind carbon copy). One, we get the email back thus knowing it made it out. Two, by using Bcc, your list of names if not shown. We like to respect the privacy our our readers. On this note, we never use the last names of our subjects unless they are already on the web, such as, Tim DeMartini, our RV dealer.

11. A final step for us is to add the travelogue to our website BigRigBible.com and index it by topic.

Finding photos in your collections.

Cameras come with photo gallery software and there many others available free on the web. We don't use them. First, while there are some features in each program, they can stuff your photos in various places that are sometimes hard to find. Second, most importantly, when you buy a new camera, you have a new program and now two places to look for pictures. And if you get photos from others, you might a third and fourth place to look. This can become a big nightmare.

There are two type of searches you will find yourself doing. 1) "Where is that photo of Tom and Patty, you know those folks we met at Port San Luis?" 2) "Hey, this is a great photo, where was it taken?"

We have a simple method that solves both problems, requires no special software, works on PCs and MACs and doesn't change with a new camera. We store our photos in weekly folders. And then we keep a daily diary.

Daily Diary

We use a simple text editor like Notepad to log one entry per day of our travels. Each week has a travelogue topic title. Each day has the date, our mileage, where we stayed, the utilities, rating and cost and then who we met and spent time with.

Sample of Daily Diary

Here for three weeks in January 2009 we our daily mileage , where we stayed, utilities, ratings and who we met.

Week 128 Southern California Coast
01-25-09 48185 Oceanside Elks , Em, Chad
01-24-09 48185 Oceanside Elks , Mel,Em,Chad
01-23-09 48185 Oceanside Elks EWD (3) $18
01-22-09 48068 Canoga Park Elks EWD (3) $12
01-21-09 48015 Oxnard Elks EW (2.5) $15
01-20-09 47998 Seacliff CA Rincon Beach RV
01-19-09 47998 Seacliff CA Rincon Beach RV Dry (3) $25
Week 127 Begin Tour 2009
01-18-09 47952 Ocean Mesa, El Capitan, SB CA EWS (4) $70
01-17-09 47888 Paul's House
01-16-09 47888 Paul's House
01-15-09 47888 Paul's House
01-14-09 47888 Paul's House 2W
01-13-09 47851 Port San Luis, Avila, Carla, Paula, John
01-12-09 47851 Port San Luis Jetty,Mike/Margi Cleugh
Week 126 Atascadero
01-11-09 47841 SLO Elks,
01-10-09 47831 Port San Luis, Tom/Patty,Allen/Diane, Melissa
01-09-09 47831 Port San Luis Jetty Dry (4) $25
01-08-09 47799 Atascadero Elks
01-07-09 47799 Atascadero Elks
01-06-09 47799 Atascadero Elks, lunch with Wally, dinner at John/Harmony
01-05-09 47799 Atascadero Elks, lunch with Dennis and Lynda

Photo Storage by Week

This directory shows the files names for Weeks 001 to 134 (with a gap).

Here's how we search: 1) "Where is that photo of Tom and Patty, you know those folks we met at Port San Luis?" We use the computer search of our Daily Diary find Port San Luis in weeks 126 and 127. And we find Tom/Patty in week 126. Or we could have searched for Patty and found all the Patty's and zero in on Tom/Patty. Now, we know the week. Then we use the PC Picture Viewer program to look at each photo for that week to find photo DSC09390.JPG and here it is.

Oh, not a good photo. That's okay, we take another when we see them again in Indianapolis.

2) "Hey, this is great photo (DSC09619.JPG), where was it taken?"

Hmmmmm, not sure. So we look at the date in the directory and find it was taken on 01-19-2009. We look at our Daily Diary and find that is was at Rincon Beach, Seacliff, California. We have also used this technique to pinpoint a location by looking at the dates and times of the photos before and after our target photo.

Note that this method is fabulous for everyone, not just RV travelers. Want to document your life? Use this and you can find anything and the date you did it. Nice !!!

Yeah, we know this is a lot of technical stuff, but it is really easy once you learn it. And hey, you didn't have to read it; there is no test.

Love, Pete, Ellen and Mandy

By Pete . Ellen Mattson