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About Mira Terra Images

About the Director

A native of Coronado, California, Kymri is an avid world traveler possessing a deep enthusiasm to share life experiences. Fueled by her interest in languages, culture and geography, she earned a B.A. degree in International Relations from U.S. International University in Hertfordshire, England. Her language studies include French, German, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic; with a smattering of self-learned Italian, Greek, Swahili, and Welsh. Her professional experience over the years includes acting, tour directing, private investigation and executive-level management; but the travel and cruise industry have held her captive for almost two decades. She has lived and worked in London, New York, Washington DC, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Santa Barbara. She presently resides in Cardiff by the Sea, California.

About the Photographer

At the age of 10, Kymri was placed into a special interests curriculum of after school activities which included photography. Her first camera was a hand-me-down from her father, an old Argus SLR in a tattered leather case, accompanied by an Argus slide projector, both of which still function to this day.

Introduced at such a ripe age, photography became an instinctive skill which she has built upon over the years, ever continuing to educate herself through experimentation, field work, and rolls and rolls of film resulting in boxes and boxes of slides. She began her love affair with Canon when she received as a graduation present the original “Sure Shot”, with interchangeable fixed, wide-angle and telephoto lenses and corresponding snap-on viewfinders. Her next camera was the Canon AE-1 Programmable. It was with this camera that she refined her skills and explored her creativity as a photographer. Years later and still a loyal Canon enthusiast, she became smitten with the technology of the EOS system and it’s selection of specialized EF lenses, so the next camera to enter her clutches was the Canon EOS Elan II. With the emergence of digital camera technology, Kymri added the Canon EOS line to her bags, which currently consists of the EOS 5D Mark II and the 60D. Then the evolution of smartphone camera technology put the iphone4 and HTC Vivid in the bags. No doubt this paragraph will continue to grow right along with the advances in digital technology.

About the Traveler

Kymri’s first overseas travels were at age 15, when she spent a month in France on a study tour with her high school French class. The next summer she went to Britain, where, for her first cruise, she joined the Edinburgh Arts Council on a sailing trip around the Scottish Isles aboard the Marques, a gorgeous old schooner better known for appearances in Dracula, and for portraying the HMS Beagle in the BBC series The Voyage of Charles Darwin.

Kymri went on to pursue a university education in England, thus being close enough to Europe to travel during breaks, always with camera and journal in hand. After graduation, Kymri returned home with a trunk full of photos, albums and travel journals. Her many jobs since college served to feed her travel bug: she worked for the County of San Diego in the Map Plotting Department; she worked for a private investigator and traveled across the country in pursuit of missing and abducted children; she worked as a road manager for visiting bands and musicians on their west coast tours; but it was entry-level job as a reservationist for a cruise company that opened the door to the world. She climbed her way through the travel industry, camera in hand, and developed the relationships and reputation to land her images in brochures and get her business “on the map” as a travel photographer. Meanwhile, she met and married another avid traveler - they got engaged in Buenos Aires, Argentina, got married at Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania (with a ceremony conducted in three languages), and have spent every anniversary abroad ever since – India, Nepal, the Baltics, Canada, Tahiti, Mexico, Morocco, and continue the tradition now with their 10-year-old daughter.

About the Writer

With her left hand, Kymri has scribed her thoughts into journals since a very young age. She has recorded her earliest memories, her dreams, her feelings, her observations, and the details of life as she experiences it. Kymri’s writing and journaling was greatly inspired by her parents, both of whom were talented creative writers in their own right. Kymri continues to record her travel experiences by hand in journals, in addition to posting online travel blogs and articles live while on assignment (pending internet availability).

About the Passion

When Kymri’s father died suddenly after she graduated from university, she would discover that she had inherited most of her predilections from a long family history of travelers and photographers. Her great granduncle Charles Wilt founded the Wilt Luggage Company with a storefront on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Her grandmother, whom she never met, had traveled the world by steamship in the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s, leaving behind a steamer trunk full of travel diaries and boxes of carefully labeled slides, detailing every port of call and every city, town, and restaurant visited during her decades of travels.

Also discovered in the attic were even more boxes of slides, which documented her father’s roadtrip from Chicago to California along Route 66 in the 1950’s. A few years and a few more family deaths later, boxes of slides and photo albums continued to surface, and family members continued to bequeath their collections to Kymri, the youngest and last of the Wilts. Kymri’s long-term project is to publish a travel photography book with her own and inherited images of the same destinations captured 50 or more years apart. So far she has traced her grandmother’s footsteps through Egypt, India, China, central Mexico, and eastern Europe; and her father’s travels through New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado.

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