Since I am interested in photographing animals that exist in far away places, I travel a lot.  In the past ten years I have been many places to photograph all varieties of animals and landscapes.  So, recently, my passport was about to expire.  Now, as a traveler you don't think much about your passport, other than making sure you have it with you and it has all the requisite stamps.  And, did you know, you can have the state department add pages as it fills up? But you can only do it two times.  With all the travel my passbook was maxed out with pages and when I replaced it almost totally full of visas and entrance/exit stamps.  So, as I was paging through it one day, thinking about all the incredible places I have been lucky to visit, the idea of trying to do something photographically came to mind.  What if I could create a collage that reflected the variety of places represented in my passport?   Well, something like this:

Passport CollageImages of visa, entrance and exit stamps from my expired passport

So, I set about making photos of each page.  I used my 5D3 with 100MM macro lens and the Canon ring light flash, hand held.  Then I tried to assemble a collage myself.  While it turned out sort of like I was imagining, my Photoshop skills didn't allow me to get the professional look.  So, I called my trusty web consultant, Shari Warren.  She accepted the assignment and 33 photoshop layers later I had this image.

With the image in my files, I have now had some fun thinking about how to use it.  First, of course, I will print it and see if it might look good on the wall.  Then, I think it would make a great opening slide for a slide show to a photo club.  

SW_PassportCollage_FIN3-Edit-Edit-Edit

And then, I came up with the idea of my Passport Portfolio. Here is one example:

Passport Portfolio - the MusketeersThree intrepid photographers on an adventure some place wild.

I think it might be fun to create composites like this with all the folks who were on the journeys represented in my passport.  And, of course, it is always fun to look at the image and recall some of these special places.