a year in photos

As I begin writing, it is exactly 366 days – to the hour and minute, no less – since the timestamp on the very first photo we took after departing from Chicago’s Midway airport on a cool January afternoon. In the intervening months, we found ourselves in 10 countries (12 if you count layovers in airports), 3 continents, 6 time zones and in countless guest houses or hotels.

We were on flights operated by Southwest Airlines, Malaysia Airlines, Lao Airlines, Air Asia, Thai Airways, Aeroflot and British Airways. We traveled by bus, train, boat, motorcycle, car, tractor and elephant. And, I’m sure you’ll be shocked to know, through it all we had our trusty Leica C-Lux and Canon Rebel XTi (18-200mm and 50mm lenses) digital cameras.

As you know, our year was extremely well documented with photographs:

30.1 GB, or 14,423 photos, all from Asia (and our brief stop in Los Angeles)
2.22 GB, or 974 photos while in Toronto and Chicago last summer
3.08 GB, or 1,488 photos during our month in France
4.00 GB, or 68 videos from the entire trip

For a grand total of 39.40 GB of photos and video, comprised of 16,953 photo and video files. In case you’re not clear on this point, that’s a lot of photos, even by our standards.

Of course, the actual number of photos we took was substantially higher – though we’ll never have an exact count – because we deleted countless photos in the camera that didn’t turn out very well. And, to be fair, of the nearly 17,000 photos we retained, a goodly portion of them are probably expendable.

But now, one year and one day since we embarked on our grand journey, we can say that our year in photos is up on flickr. The collection has been narrowed to 2,379 photos from Asia, another 313 from France, and 74 from our visit to Toronto and Chicago this summer.

You’ll find lots of photos of food

some beautiful sunsets

plenty of flowers

unique cultural performances

all sorts of markets

and some monkeys for good measure

Not to mention everything else that inspired us to use the camera. And don’t forget, in many cases, the photos come with captions, to provide further insight into our experiences.

We have the photos grouped together in an Asia set, as well as sets for each country we visited: Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, India, Toronto/Chicago, and France. Or you can just click through the regular pages, where you’ll see them in the order uploaded (within the sets, they are in chronological order, oldest to newest).

If you want to leave comments on the photos, or download them for yourself, you need to sign in with a flickr account. Signing up for one is free; it uses the same login as yahoo, if you have a yahoo account.

In any case, with 2,766 photos from our trip on flickr, if each is worth 1,000 words, we leave you with 2,766,000 words (not counting captions, of course). Enjoy.