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If you were an Operation Raleigh 10F venturer, staff member or science team leader, this is a terrific opportunity to share your stories with others who were part of this expedition or with young people around the world now considering a similar experience.

I am only one voice, one perspective, amongst the many who spent three months on Seram back in 1987. Your experiences and insights would make for wonderful reading and would be of enormous interest to expedition participants. This is also an opportunity for you to reconnect with others. I know that some of you would relish an opportunity to do this but there is no obligation to share your contact details if you would simply like to share your stories or photos.

If you would like to contribute stories or photos to this site then I can create a gallery and/or story page for you and upload your text and images.

Simply send me a message and consider including the following. Respond to as few or as many of these as you wish. Happy writing! Lorna 🙂

  • Your name? (back then and now if it has changed)
  • Your role in the expedition? If you were a venturer then let us know which teams you joined during the expedition. A list of the projects can be found HERE
  • Which parts of Seram did you spend time in? Check the map of the expedition area HERE
  • What memories or memorabilia do you still have? What stories would you like to share? Write as little or as much as you like.
  • Where did life take you after the expedition?
  • How did the expedition impact on your life? What did you gain or lose? What did you learn about yourself or the world?
  • Share some of your favourite photos. See my photo tips below.
  • Include your contact details if you would like to share them.
  • And anything I have not listed here that you would also like to share.

Photo tips

If you are going to get prints or slides digitised then make sure your scans are a sufficient size and quality to be clearly seen. Here is the process I used to create the images you can see in the galleries on this site.

My images were a collection of colour slides, and colour negatives with matching prints, and yours are no doubt the same format. I scanned these at a higher resolution (300 dpi TIFF) and larger size (approx. 3500 x 2500 pixels) than needed on the website so that I would have a collection of good quality original digital scans that I could use for other purposes if ever needed. Each of these images was around 25 Mb.

After they had been scanned I used the software Adobe photoshop to crop the photos, ‘clean up’ the dust particles and scratches, and adjust the colour balance, resolution, size and format so that each uploaded image was a 72 dpi JPG, approx. 1000 x 680 pixels (this determines the viewing size) and 800 Kb in size. If you are sending only a few photos and don’t have a means to do this yourself I am happy to do this for you.

Photo by Kai Bansner