✣ Bernie's African Odyssey ✣: MY PHOTO DIARIES COME TO LIFE-WHAT AN INCREDIBLE JOURNEY

I am lucky.

I have seen a lot of this planet. I have seen a lot with my own eyes but also through the lens of a camera. I am certainly not shy when it some to taking a picture. I have always been like that, ever since my dad bought me my first camera when I was 10 years old. Back in the day, when you took a photo not knowing if it worked and getting your photos back from the printing place was a rush of excitement as you opened that photo packet not knowing what to expect.

Ahhhhhhh the good old days of photography.

Even back in those days, the cost of printing did not deter me from taking pictures. I remember after my 8 week trip through Egypt, Turkey and South Africa, I had 18 rolls of film, each one labelled and numbered so that as I got my pay check each week I was able to develop them in order as I put together my hard copy PHOTO ALBUM to bore friends with.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh the good old days of photography.

I think all the electronic age of cameras has done for me has enabled me to just take more photos, more ‘perfect’ photos and more options of the one shot to be able to pick the best version. So with this said, when I travelled for 23 months on my World Odyssey, I saw some amazing places, met some amazing people and journeyed to places that a lot of ‘normal’ people don’t get to travel to and with those experiences comes the opportunities for photos, lots of photos, thousands of photos and out of those there are always a group of photos, that you just look at and go ‘man that is a good shot’. Or in my professionally worded lingo ‘that is a keeper’ or ‘that is a Nat Geo shot’.

I am lucky.

So when I finally finished my travels and settled in Kenya I had this bright idea that I would actually be able to kick back, re-read my blog entries that I kept on my trip, relive the memories and then go through my 65,000, yes, SIXTY FIVE THOUSAND photos, picking all the ‘keepers’ and ‘Nat Geo’ shots and make photo books out of the highly competitive photo selection criteria. Well as all good plans tend to go, life caught up and I just didn’t have the time or the patience to sit there and literally wade through thousands and thousands of photos. In my defence I am a VERY ORGANISED person and I had them all labelled and filed into sections, country and then places/days, so that side of things wasn’t so bad, but man it seemed like a daunting job and I just couldn’t take the first step of opening that first album, having to choose a handful of pictures from hundreds, selecting them, pasting them, editing them and moving on. Remember SIXTY FIVE THOUSAND.

Then one day when I was at my mosaic class and Debs showed me a photo book that she had done in South Africa of a family get together and it was just awesome and it was the kick that I needed to get my arse into gear and that night I started my homework on what company to use to get my own photobooks started. Like anything else on the internet there were around 10 different companies that kept cropping up in reviews. There were some very top end companies and as much as I was happy to pay a little more to get a good quality book, I wasn’t prepared to pay 100 bucks a book. I found a company called BLURB, which price wise was middle of the pack and had an easy interface to work with and my work began. None of them delivered to Kenya, but this was okay, it was July 2014, I was going to be in Australia in the October, so that would give me 4 months to get the books completed, printed and sent to Oz where I would collect them and bring them home to Kenya. Now I hear you say JULY! That should be enough time, but unless you have done a photo book before, not only is the photo selection a long process, uploading them to the online programme, arranging them and setting them up into some form of order is just as a big task let me tell you. I am lucky again that I am an ORGANISED person and I had all my travel diaries, for the whole 2 years travel, not a day was left undocumented, so I was able to pull them out and get all the places we visited and any other information that I needed for the books. As I was doing a ‘few’ I wanted them to all have a similar layout, a common theme and like a mad woman, the next 4 weeks of any spare time was spent on the computer sorting and editing photos, uploading and then arranging the photos. There would be nights that I would sit there for 6 hours just doing that, sorting editing, uploading and arranging, and sometimes all day as well making for 12-15 hour days, sorting photos.

My next hurdle was to get one printed, check the quality, and make sure it all looked good, before I proceeded to print the rest of my photo diary library. It just wasn’t one or two books I was looking at, if you know me, I don’t do things in halves and by the time I finished my World Odyssey collection I would have 14 books in total! My first printed book was my Antarctic book and it came out even better than I expected. It was wonderful to see my own images in book format. I was actually chuffed and all the hard work had paid off. I didn’t have a super expensive camera on my journeys, I had a 300 buck, 30 optical zoom, single lens and a small point and shoot that took all my pictures and the images were sensational. With 4 other books all ready to go, I pushed them through to print and to save postage I picked them up in Oklahoma before heading back to Kenya with 5 books in hand. I have since been back to the computer and have completed another 9 books since my return. I plan to either get Shelly to send them in the coming months or they ‘might’ even be able to bring them themselves if they decide to visit Africa later this year. Either way I am onto my very last book, and it will be a little sad when it is completed, but it just gives me more motivation for more travel, even if it is only in Kenya so that I can continue to get more books printed in the future.

Even though it was TIME CONSUMING to say the least, I do have to say it was a truly rewarding experience as well. It was amazing to relive my whole 2 years on my World Odyssey and also my first 2 years in Kenya. People capture remarkable things with their cameras and if they are lucky they may upload the good ones to Facebook, maybe, just maybe print one or two of them and then their daily life catches up and the trip, whether of a life time or their yearly gallivant overseas, the trip becomes a distant memory. Everyone should look at their photos at least once after a trip. Get a glass of wine, put up their feet and really look at the pictures. Appreciate what they saw, the people they met and just how lucky they are to be able to travel and be thankful of the opportunities that they are given. We live in a crazy mixed up world at the moment and we have lost the urge to stop and literally smell the flowers. So pull out the photos from your last trip and look at them. You may not have the time or the money to print books like I have, but do yourself a favour, you will not be sorry.

I’m proud of my travel diaries and I will be more inclined to pick up one of my 14 completed books, have a flick through and smile at what has been seen and of course the people and friendships I have made on all the trips more regularly, maybe with that glass of wine in hand.

Yes I am very lucky indeed.

To view any of the books, the links are below and enjoy your journey through my eyes.