Before Montgomery married in 1911, she told George Boyd MacMillan, her Scottish pen-pal whom she and Ewan would be visiting on their honeymoon, that she had bought a "dandy new . . . kodak" for taking snaps on the tour (MDMM, 58). She used many of these photographs to illustrate the scrapbooks. MacMillan was a reporter for the newspaper the Alloa Journal in Scotland, and he recorded her visit to his office in an article she pasted into her scrapbook. MacMillan noted that she makes "use of the 'Kodak' by means of which the novelist seeks to provide herself with souvenirs of her tour."

There are no more batches of new cyanotypes in the scrapbooks once Montgomery has the new Kodak, but she continues to take photographs enthusiastically for decades. She kept a separate cache of photographs in later life and separate albums for the hundreds of photographs of Chester and Stuart, though pictures of them do appear numerous times in the scrapbooks as well. When she was given a Kodak movie camera in 1931, she enjoyed it enormously.

In 1999, the Confederation Centre Art Gallery and Museum mounted an exhibition of Montgomery's photography called The Visual Imagination of Lucy Maud Montgomery; the black-and-white photographs were from the Montgomery collection of the University of Guelph archives. The curator was Dr. Elizabeth Rollins Epperly of UPEI's L.M. Montgomery Institute (also curator for this Virtual Museum of Canada exhibition). The 1999 exhibition included a display of period photographic equipment and a 4 X 5 camera.

Montgomery's interest in photography was life-long. There is much still to be learned by comparing her photographs with her written descriptions and by assessing how the trained eye of the photographer affects the composing of written scenes.

[For further information see Dr. Elizabeth R. Epperly's chapter "L.M. Montgomery's Visual Imagination" in Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture ed. Irene Gammel (U of Toronto P, 2002). Also see "A Writer's Visual Imagination".]