Coming Together to Picture Hope: A Book in the Works

Photo by Shutter Sister Maile Wilson. One of the images featured in our "Picture Hope: An Invitation to the Journey" Blurb book to launch this month.

As a follow up to Jen's last post, we are really excited to share some Picture Hope plans with you all. Our first trip to Tanzania and Rwanda is scheduled to kick off in several weeks, following the BlogHer conference this month. We've finalized all of the contest paperwork with Lenovo and now move to solidifying our travel arrangements, storycatching equipment, communication devices, packing lists and Daddy-do lists. Both Jen and I have received all of our vaccinations for Hepatitis A & B, Yellow Fever, Polio, Tetanus, Meningococcal Meningitis, and Typhoid Fever, a handful of prescriptions to avoid Malaria, the Flu, and (gulp) a myriad of potential digestive complications. (I can hear Jen laughing at me now ;-)

But one of the more important and exciting plans we've made is to publish a photo book "Picture Hope: An Invitation to the Journey" with support from Blurb as an opportunity to honor you, our Shutter Sisters, and to give back to the individuals we'll meet and feature in our images, videos and words on this journey. All proceeds from the sale of this book will be contributed to our storytellers.

Since April 1st, we've been collecting images of hope from you in the Picture Hope flickr group to produce an image libary of printed hope notes to take on our journey. Taking this concept one step further, we selected more than 60 images from you talented women and captured a handful of hope quotes from our Facebook fans to create an amazing book set to launch in the Shutter Suite at BlogHer. The book will be available for sale online. I hope you'll like it. And we sincerely appreciate you being a part of it.