Field Journaling

When working to keep a field journal, sometimes you have to work with the data you collect for awhile before finding a solution on how to keep an interesting running record. I’ve been working on this with the trail cam for awhile now – and those of you following this blog have seen some of the attempts – like this one – and this one. But printing them didn’t seem to work well – the photos were too small or too cluttered. I also tried the baseball card sized pocket pages. Again, too small of images.

The trail cam is mainly a visual one, which works great online, but not so easy to figure out how to handle it as a physical record. Just creating a list of what was caught on the trail cam wouldn’t satisfy me. Lists of times and dates just isn’t very interesting. We’ve had the trail cam now for four months and I finally found a solution using scrapbooking products – a 12″x12″ album (still need to buy one just for the trail cam records); Design F of Becky Higgins plastics; and 4×6 cards for the trail cam report I’ve created myself and prints of the trail cam images sized to the 3×4 pockets in the Becky Higgins pocketed page protectors (aka ‘the plastics’). 3×4 is the same ratio of the images taken by the camera, and are large enough to get a good idea of what was captured by the cam. I’ll also include a disc of the images in the album.

Once I get caught up on the daily record section, I’ll add in pages for each species – typical of the Grinnell method. To divide things up, I can see already that I’ll need to order more of Becky’s Dividers. They’re wonderfully heavy plastic and I’ll be using my grandmother’s old typewriter to type on the heavy duty stickers that come with them.

And – here’s a close up of the card I created for the Trail Cam Report. It’s printed on 80lb cover cardstock I ordered from The Paper Mill. Right now I’m printing the photos on a white cardstock. I may try having a set printed on photo paper and see if I like it better.