Quick tips from a travel blogger

How to tell your travel story

Creating the perfect travel book is no easy feat. We spoke with Dutch travel blogger Anne Stikvoort (@annestikvoort) and got her top tips to creating a great photo book and making the trip of a lifetime last a lifetime.

Exactly one year ago my boyfriend and I started our travel through Asia for three months. We visited so many interesting countries and took tons of photos along the way. Normally back home I just store my travel photos somewhere on a hard drive, but this time I wanted to do something different. Because the Asia travel was such a special memory to the both of us, I decided to create a photo book out of a selection of the best and most memorable pictures we took. This way we would be able to experience these months of travelling all over again while just sitting on the couch with an actual book - no need for photo libraries and screens this time! Sometimes it just feels so good to have an offline experience. It took me quite some effort to create my dream book, since creating the perfect photo book isn't easy at all and takes a lot of time. Therefore I thought it might be helpful to share some useful tips with you.

Use the same edit or filter for all your photos

For me being a visual perfectionist this is one of the most important things when it comes to creating a photo book or overview (like on Instagram). So my advice: experiment a bit with different filters or edits and decide what type of editing you like the most for your photos. I think it is always best to keep the editing a bit basic instead of the risk of editing them too much - this way you'll probably still like your book in ten, twenty or even thirty years.

Quality over quantity

Creating a beautiful photo book is not about using as many photos as possible, but about carefully selecting your best and most memorable shots. In the selection process you can also try to keep in mind which photos will look great together on a page (for example based on the colors or location).

 Decide what story you would like to tell

A photo book is so much more fun when it tells a story. For example, in my case I decided to tell the story of our 3 months of travelling through Asia, but you can of course also tell the story of your wedding day, childhood and so on. Your story can help you with placing your photos in a certain order.

Include some additional text or fun captions

For telling a good story it can be really useful to include some fun quotes or, like I did, the locations of the places we visited during our travel.

And finally, don't take creating your book too seriously. Because in the end creating a photo book should be so much fun!