Digital to analogue: how printing added an extra dimension to Katie Edwards' quirky travel photography

Photographer and influencer Katie Edwards has an unusual twist on travel photography: she specialises in capturing the world through train windows. She has journeyed thousands of kilometres across Europe and the United States, taken hundreds of thousands of photographs, and shared selected images both online on her social accounts and in printed form in exhibitions.

Recently, however, she took a compact Canon photo printer with her on a train journey, so she could print and share images on the spot. With the SELPHY Photo Layout app on her smartphone, which enabled her to transfer photos from her camera and print them out wirelessly on the portable printer, she could take a compact mini photo studio wherever she went. The idea was that even as her photographs capture fleeting moments, the prints would preserve them and return them to the physical world, small tangible fragments of shared experience. As it turned out, the project sparked connections that Katie hadn't anticipated. Here's what happened.

It all began a few years ago. Whenever Katie, a professional photographer, happened to be taking the train to shoots around the UK, she naturally had her camera with her, and her unusual passion was born. "After about six months or so," she recalls, "I started to do dedicated train window expeditions. I started with a small trip to the Netherlands because I wanted to photograph the tulips out of the train window. It grew from there.

"I started doing long train trips in Europe when my now-husband and I were in a long-distance relationship – he was in Germany, and I was in the UK. Now we've expanded it to the rest of Europe and travel together."

Not long ago, Katie completed a trip of 10,000 miles around the US by Amtrak, which led to an exhibition of prints at a gallery in London. In April 2026, Interrail sponsored an exhibition of her train window pictures of the Netherlands in bloom, held at Utrecht Centraal station.

"At first it was very much, for me, just about an individual photo and capturing an improbable moment," Katie explains. "Sometimes it's a landscape, but in truth it's more about the unlikely detail that you might capture at speed.

"On a recent trip from Belgrade to Sarajevo, I caught a picture of a girl mid-jump on a trampoline – she's literally just in the air, waving, and she's just on the edge of the frame. I've gone past hundreds of back gardens and trampolines, and this was on my wish list of things I really want to happen. And I felt an amazing joy. Some of the greatest joys that I feel are when I managed to get something unlikely out of a train window. And it's almost more satisfying when something is just on the edge of the frame, because it so nearly didn't make it."

It doesn't end there, though. "I discovered that the train acts like the perfect dolly – when you're shooting in burst mode and then string all those windows together, you end up with enormous linear panoramas. That wasn't the plan, but it really excited me."

Then, she continues, she started to stitch sequences of images together, essentially creating stop-motion films. "At first, this was just because I wanted to find a way of sharing them online and giving them a little bit more reach. But I think subsequently it's almost become as much about filmmaking as about photography."

Sharing her work had a suprising result, Katie reveals. "Sometimes the people I'd photographed through the window found themselves in the images and then reached out to me. It was surreal to have this connection only because I accidentally once photographed them from a moving train."

Unintended or not, Katie says this connection with people has now become important to her. This was one of the reasons for wanting to mount her exhibition at Utrecht Centraal station – "I thought it would be exciting to meet people who had just come off the route which I'd photographed." Broadenng this community aspect, she has also established her Rail Mail Club: every month, she sends subscribers a postcard print of a train window photo, with a letter telling the story behind the picture.

The tangibility of print is crucial for Katie. "The internet's brilliant in so many ways, but it's in my nature to want that physical interaction. Even if you don't actually meet a person, it's a sort of physical exchange."

That was Katie's intention for this print project. She planned to print her photos while on the train and leave prints behind in the carriage where they were taken. On the back of each print, she would invite whoever found it to write something about their own journey or simply what they felt in that moment. In this way, the prints would become an exchange between anonymous travellers, one capturing the passing moment in tangible form and another responding to it. Instead of a merely digital image that someone comments about online, the physical print in an actual location changes the way people connect to it.

"I love this kind of thing – hiding stuff on the spot and interacting with people," Katie confesses. In the train terminal station in every capital city she's visited, she reveals, she has hidden a little rubber stamp with a unique code on it. Her social media followers are invited to bring their own ink pads and paper and take an impression – and if they collect ten, she sends them a free poster. The treasure hunt has attracted responses from "all over," she reports, "from Ankara all the way up to Stockholm."

Thinking along similar lines for this print project, Katie took a Canon SELPHY CP1500 compact printer with her on the train. This portable photo printer was ideal for the task – it uses dye-sublimation printing technology, which means it produces vibrant, lab-quality colour prints with no separate ink cartridges required, prints are completely dry and ready to handle straight out of the printer, and they are water, scratch and fingerprint resistant.

Printing was very straightforward. The SELPHY CP1500 offers a range of connectivity options, including USB-C for connecting computers, cameras and USB flash drives, and a built-in card reader, so you can pop the SD card from your camera straight into the printer. Katie opted to print wirelessly using the SELPHY Photo Layout app on her smartphone.

The app gives you the option of customising your photos before printing, adding text, borders and creative effects such as stamps. You can also choose from a range of single- and multi-photo layout templates. Katie chose to print her images without enhancement, at the largest postcard size. "I decided not to add effects, captions or labels," she explains – "I wanted it to feel more personal and get people's handwritten responses on the back."

One option in the app did appeal to Katie: adding a QR code, creating a link that viewers can scan to be taken to a web or social media page. "It'd be fun to leave a print with a QR code on it and just see what happens when somebody finds it. That was actually my initial idea – I'd leave the prints and just see what connection people make with them."

Katie did leave some postcard-size prints on train seats, and people did leave handwritten responses on the back of them. But something else started to happen: what Katie was doing itself broke the ice and sparked conversations with her fellow travellers. "It's already odd standing on a train taking pictures. But when you get a printer out on a train and start printing... well, people got interested.

"Everyone's got a different reason for being on a train, whether it's a commute or a grand tour, and this was definitely a catalyst for having a chat."

The common thread in Katie's work is making personal connections through shared experience. Whichever way she shares her train window pictures, she says, "so many people will write and say, 'Oh, that's the road I used to walk along to school every day', or 'That's my dad's farm'. It's incredible to share these pictures and then get other people's stories about what the tiny little space in the frame means to them."

However, this project added a new dimension. Printing her images right there on the train table, with the SELPHY CP1500 able to output prints so quickly and effortlessly, made the process feel "surprisingly immediate," she notes. "It's a fantastic thing to be able to physically hold the view from a window in your hand while you're actually on the train that is hurtling through the landscape." Her fellow travellers ended up responding heartily to that immediacy.

The prints from the SELPHY CP1500 are durable and writable, making them ideal keepsakes, Katie says. For her, however, "it's definitely more about the interactions. It's definitely much less like scrapbooking or creating a travel journal or anything like that."

Because the prints are tangible and so immediate, "in some ways they're like bringing the outside world directly into the train, which otherwise wouldn't be possible. So it became less about the prints or just fleeting moments outside the train, and more about connections inside it. I'm pleased that that's how it turned out."


Written by Alex Summersby