China 2013 | The Photos, Part One

As I get ready to head out on another crazy adventure I've had a few people ask, "Did you ever post about your China trip?"

Good question! I didn't. Not because I didn't want to but because, you know, time gets away. 

First of all, it was awesome.

Where do I even begin?

I took 1982 photos with my DSLR (aka my "big" camera) on my two week trip to China last November.

I took 290 with my iphone.

Aaron took about 1700 photos all with his iphone.

Total photos in my China folder in Aperture: 3975 (before editing)

That could be the most I've taken on a trip but I don't think I've recorded any of the numbers in the past.

Here's how I tackle starting to even scratch the surface of those photos: 

STEP ONE | Look through all the photos. Delete the ones that are absolutely terrible - totally black, really extra blurry, really bad facial expressions, multiples of the same thing x10. This trip I shot in manual with my DSLR so I had multiples of quite a few photos that were either way too light or way too dark (so thankful I can learn via digital where I can actually see the mistakes I'm making). I'm pretty ruthless when it comes to deleting. I really don't need to have five of the same photo. Really. 

STEP TWO | Decide what to print. For this travel album I'm using an album from Basic Grey but I haven't tackled that at all yet.I don't print everything. I mainly look for my favorites or ones that really move the travel story forward. Could be favorite memories or monuments or something totally random. I'll choose a few to enlarge to the full page size in the album but I haven't made any of those choices yet. 

I started going through which photos I wanted to share here and it's quite a process in and of itself. For this post I started adding in photos until I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer. I'll do a Part Two with the rest of the trip sometime soon. 

Here's a look at the first part of our China adventure from November 2013: 

Our trip began with an overnight in San Francisco. It happened to be my 38th birthday.

And in case you didn't know, I love experiencing the world so it was a pretty fun way to celebrate. 

Aaron came along with me on this trip. 

Meeting someone who also loves experiencing the world was important to me. He is a darn good travel companion. 

Our hotel room in Beijing. 

The view when we woke up. We were super lucky with some very blue sky days in Beijing.

On these trips we tend to travel by bus. In the case of the China adventure we also took two or three flights within China as we moved from location to location.

So many great people joined us on this trip. 

We actually had amazing weather on this trip. Blue skies for days. 

I can't even fathom how old everything is there. 

I took a lot of shots of rooftops. The details were insane. 

Someday I'd like to get really good at photographing people I don't know. It's something I thought a lot about while we were there. So many weathered faces. So many faces with stories I wondered about. 

The Great Wall was so, so cool. 

Standing on the Great Wall, looking out, I saw this: 

The night market. We had just one adventurous eater in our group - that would be Barry. He ate a snake among other things. 

Just so beautiful. All of it. 

I loved walking down this long walkway and watching all the people playing games. Their faces. Their laughter. There was even singing. 

Looking back. 

A page in my travel journal. 

A group rickshaw ride that was one of my personal favorite moments. The air. The sounds. Being there. It was one of those memories you feel with your whole body. 

The Summer Palace. 

How can you not smile when looking at these people. 

The Birds Nest at the Olympic park. 

I'm a Chinese food fan so I was perfectly happy to have it breakfast, lunch and dinner.  

Visiting the Terra Cotta Warriors. 

Oh there's still so much more. 

Another day friends. 

PS | Did you notice we did a Shop update yesterday? I've now got four new clear stamp sets (Birthday, Celebrate, Photos, and Thanks) and a few of my other go-to products available in the Shop. You can see it all here.