Kids' Books

The "books" are hand crafted photo collections with pictures from some of our larger trips. We made them from scratch as birthday presents for our niece and nephew. All photos are of course our own. Most are taken with my own Parasonic Lunix but some of the higher resolution ones are from Bernd's Nikon SLR. For the layout I used the Apple IPhoto book function, then printed the pages on reinforced cardboard and had them bound at a local copy shop.

As always, the kids secretly prefer their more professional looking childrens' books but the adults seem to like our versions.

Bernd and Sylvie in Africa

In the winter of 2007/8 we traveled to Africa. Among other things we got a chance to spend a few days on safari in some of the best wildlife parks in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, and Tanzania. Not surprisingly, we took several thousand wildlife pictures. When we came back, we turned some of the best shots into this book. (The rest unfortunately still rots in a wild heap on my hard drive and waits to be sorted...)

Bernd and Sylvie in Asia

For the next Christmas break we went to South-East Asia. We started out in Saigon and over the course of the next five weeks made our way though south Vietnam, up and down across Cambodia, and into Thailand. This time the story line for "The Book" was harder to find. However, in the end we decided on a selection of random, mostly funny shots. As any Asia traveler will confirm, there is really no shortage of curious sights in these places.

Technical Note: While I used IPhoto for this project, I can't necessarily recommend it. Like all Mac products, it is wickedly cool initially and screamingly limited once you move beyond the basic use cases. For example, I found it extremely easy to sort though a large set of candidate pictures and to apply a stylish looking predefined layout. But I was less impressed when I found that there was no way to increase or move the text box, restricting me to two lines of text per page.

Of course I should also point out that I didn't find any more suitable software, so in the end I stuck with IPhoto and settled for pretty pictures and some Hemingway style prose :-) Not sure what to do next year, though, when my target audience will be five and three.

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