SHE SAID:

For our first anniversary, we tried to give each other gifts in keeping with the traditional gift giving guide. Since your first year anniversary gift is supposed to be related to paper somehow, Brad made me a photo book from Apple of our first year together. It had pictures of our wedding, of course, but also different places we went and all of our “firsts” like Christmas, Valentine’s, etc.

Since everything is digital now, we’re less apt to take pictures off of the computer, get them printed and then put them in a photo album (seriously, when did people have time for that?). The great thing about photo books is their simplicity. All you basically have to do is upload your photos and wait for it to arrive in the mail.

As you know, we just came home from our winter escape from Florida. Coming home from trips can sometimes be a downer, especially when you go from bikini weather to parka weather. A fun way to relive all of the fun memories while you were away is to spend an evening together documenting it all. We put on a pot of tea we purchased from Disney World and created a timeline of our trip together. It was a nice way to transition from vacation euphoria to reality.

Photo books are a great gift to give and receive. You can have a lot of fun creating story lines to go along with your pictures and they look a whole lot better on a coffee table or shelf than those massive binders with plastic inserts.

HE SAID:

One of my favourite things to do when I visit my grandparents is to look through old photo albums. I like the ones that have pictures of things I remember as a kid, but I especially enjoy the really old black and white ones that give me a glimpse of my family’s history. After I’ve gone through a heavy pile of photo albums, I realize that it is far from a perfect system for storing pictures. The plastic pages stick together, the pictures are sometimes falling out of the slots, and all of the newspaper clippings and other random things being kept in the book make it quite difficult to browse the photos.

The best solution to the problem that I’ve found (unless you want to spend a small fortune on an iPad to look through your photos) is photo books where the pictures are actually printed on to the pages in the book. I used Apple’s service when I created one for Susan, but there are plenty of options out there. For Mac users, it’s as simple as opening iPhoto, selecting the photos you want included in your book, click on the book button in the menu at the bottom of iPhoto, then you just pick a template and fill it with photos. It’s very easy.

The prices for the books range from $5.00 to $50.00 depending on if you choose hard or soft cover, and the size of the book. The one I made Susan for our first anniversary was a large hard cover book, so it only cost about $30.00. The quality ended up being great. The hard cover was nice, and the photos (which were taken with our aging point and shoot camera) looked quite nice printed on the glossy paper.

Even if you don’t have a paper anniversary coming up, a photo book would make a great Valentine’s Day gift. It takes thought and effort to pick out all the photos and arrange them nicely. It’s a great way to share or relive fun memories.

For those of you who won’t be using iPhoto to make your photo book, don’t despair. There are plenty of options online to choose from. Check out these links and see which one works best for you. Black’s, Better Homes and Gardens, Costco, Carsand Mosher

We were recently invited to go on a local photo tour that was put together by the St. Margaret’s Bay Regional Tourism Association and Colour. The idea behind it was to show that there are so many beautiful and unique places to see that are so close to home. Well, we would like to congratulate them on a job well done because we had never been to most of the places we travelled to.

SHE SAID:

I don’t know if I’ve been living under a rock (or maybe just a pile of school work) but I had never heard of a photo tour before. I had heard of photos and also tours, but not the two combined. Photo tours are now my new favourite thing because I get to explore the outdoors, experiment with photography, and discover the hidden treasures of our province all for a very low price.

Our particular photo tour had a wonderful tour guide named Anne who really added to the experience by telling us little historical anecdotes and facts about the areas we visited. Were it not for her I would still be oblivious to the fact that a castle exists in Nova Scotia!

If there aren’t any photographers or organizations in your area that arrange photo tours, I would still highly consider scouting out a few places to explore on your own. Try the touring section of your area’s tourism website for inspiration.

Also, get a camera and remember that you don’t have to be Annie Leibovitz to have fun. We are definitely rookie photographers, but we still managed to get a couple of nice shots. Now we can make really cheap prints to hang around the house.

HE SAID:

When we got asked to come on a photo tour I was pretty excited. It’s something we had never done before, and since I’ve really gotten into seeing new parts of Nova Scotia lately, it sounded like a great way to spend a day.

Our first destination was Bayswater Beach. It was a beautiful spot with nearly white sand, and plenty of nice scenery to take in. Then we went to a little fishing village not too far from there. Our guide told us the story behind a castle we could see across the water, as well as an island covered in dead trees. Apparently, cormorants (a type of bird which are not native to Nova Scotia) were brought here and ended up destroying all the trees on the island. It was actually a pretty creepy thing to see. I’m sure we would have been making up some pretty wild stories about how it might have happened if we hadn’t been told about the birds.

Then we drove a bit farther and had lunch in Hubbards at a little spot called Dauphinee Inn. It was such a cool spot. The outside of the building was painted in very bright colours, and the staff inside were very friendly. They even gave us a little explanation about the history of the area as well as the Dauphinee Inn itself. The food was a very welcome thing as we had done a fair amount of walking that day. We had fish and crab cakes (which I hadn’t had before), beans, biscuits, and a great blueberry dessert. It was all very tasty. We then took a few pictures of the area around the Dauphinee Inn before we unfortunately had to split from the group and head home.

Unfortunately we couldn’t fit all of our pictures into this blog post, so make sure you click on one of them to see the whole Photo Tour set in Flickr. I think it’s safe to say we both had a blast. Even if you don’t have a top of the line camera (we borrowed one from my sister), or you aren’t an amazing photographer (we were worried about that at first since we aren’t pros) you should still seek out any photo tours in your area. If nothing else, you get to see some places you wouldn’t have otherwise seen, as well as meet some new people. The best part is that it’s a fairly inexpensive way to have fun. Not only that but the scenic pictures you take can be enjoyed for a long time to come (more on that in a later post). I would suggest you dig around on Twitter or Facebook to see if there are any photo tours being planned in your area. If not then why not organize one yourself?