Ecuador, Here We Come!

Tomorrow we are leaving for Ecuador. Like Africa last year, this is a trip I never dreamed I would be able to take. The Cloud Forest. The Galapagos Islands. I am humbled and grateful to be able to see such marvels so far from home.

As always, I will be blogging each day for those who are interested in following along. In truth, these posts are as much for me as anyone – I love looking back and remembering.

Excitingly, I have a new Nikon D5300 DSLR camera with both regular (18-55 mm) and telephoto (55-300 mm) lenses, so I will be able to take great long-distance photos. This photo of a juvenile red-tailed hawk way up high in a tree behind our house was taken from a distance of over 100 feet (thank you high-school geometry!). As a computer geek, I love the freedom that RAW format photos give me in Photoshop. The only drawback is that they must be edited in order to get a picture format that can be posted online. So the photos I post during the trip will be phone photos, and we’ll all have to wait until after I get home to see the finished ones from the Nikon.

Besides these blog posts, I also keep travel journals. One of the joys of being an artist is making my own journal for each trip, and I have a lovely leather journal cover given to me by my dear friend Brian. Here’s the one for this trip, all ready to go! The cover is pulp-dyed handmade (by me) paper glued to card stock, and the pages are a sturdy bamboo mixed-media paper that stands up to sketching and watercolor. I composed the graphic in Photoshop, and Mick printed it on his coffee-label printer. Perfect!

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