My books

 If you've been following along with my other blog you know the book I was expecting on Friday, that I had been told would arrive Friday, spent the weekend in UPS limbo. Somewhere. Unopened. Unloved. Unappreciated. 

On the way into a dental appointment this morning I got notified it was available for pickup just down the street. Yay!

As an aside, my dentist and hygienist think my teeth are just fine. Which they are regularly pleased by, given the events of 16 years ago, almost to the day. (Susi, DO NOT click this link, and the rest of you be warned, the post title is "More ow!!! Graphic followup..." and for darned good reason.) 

And 16 years, how time flies.

Anyway, here is the book! 62 pages, 89 images in a big lay flat book printed by Blurb. My 10th book.

I am really pleased how the photos turned out! I'm still figuring out the screen to page translation. There's one photo that I did not do the image enhance thing to, and it looks perfect on the page. There's been a few others in the other books where I went back and forth and wished I could do half of the effect, but I'm still generally pleased. The red of the cover title looked good on screen, but comes off as a bit too vibrant in print. I need to do more work on colour theory. Everything else came out really well.

Up till now, my books lived on a shelf above the photo editing computer. They and a few other books have outgrown the space, so I need to think about that. One possibility it to shelve them without the nice white box they come in. They would take up a lot less space, and I'd be able to see the titles, which is good. But the box is really nice, and it's part of the experience to take the book out of the box. I think they took a page out of Apples book when it comes to packaging their products.

There seems to be some subtle changes to the production process. Even though I used the same layouts, the photos and text seem closer to the page edge. I'm not an expert by any means, but I'm glad it's no closer, and might be considered a hair too close for good balance or layout. That's on me, I guess.

Of course I took far more photos than ended up in the book. There's a few that I winced about leaving out of the book. But when they don't go with other photos, it's hard to include them. I try to have all the photos on a set of facing pages go together somehow.

There's some film photos in the book, and they look great! Other than mentioning the film stock, I don't go into much detail about them. Some photo books have all the settings info, and commentary about why, and all it shows is the photographer spent time in their notebook when they could have been looking for the next photo. My thinking is that for most scenes, the actual settings are the least important part of the whole deal. Usually there's several combinations of settings that could produce the photo.

For the pedants out there, I do keep basic notes about the medium format photos, especially the long exposure ones. This is part of the process of looking at an end result, and at least trying to understand how I got there, in case I want to do it again, or more likely, not do it again. But generally nobody else cares.

No matter how carefully one reviews the book, mistakes creep in. One photo I thought I had gone back to re-crop ever so slightly to remove a hint of the black margin of the photo, actually didn't happen. I haven't seen a spelling mistake yet, but I'd be kind of astonished if there isn't one. The spellchecker isn't the best in the world.

Just to blow my own horn, mainly because if I don't, who else will. Which actually isn't true, there are several people who have sung my praises as a photographer, and all thanks go out to them. Here's the other books I've done, big lay flat hard covers first, then soft covers. When I say big, the hard covers are about 12.5 x 11 inches.

Overall I'm really pleased by the books. It's been fun to produce them, and the experience has changed my photography. When I'm out on a photo ramble I'm now thinking about what images might go in a book, along with text and other images, and why. I'm trying to think if there's a story beyond 'there I was and this is what I saw.'

As a technical note, I'm using Blurb's Bookwright software. It's a free download, is reasonably easy to learn to use, and gives lots of choices about fonts, layout, and control over the various elements. Certainly if you've never done a book before, this is a great place to start, unless you're already famous and expect to sell a million copies, in which case you've already got an editor and publisher drooling at your feet to take care of the details.

As another digression, there's a joke about this. When asked how to become a famous photographer, the response was to become famous for something else, like being an actor, or singer, or sports star, and then learn photography.

One of the rules to remember when doing a book is that the perfect is the enemy of the good. None of my books are perfect. Not even close. For all I know the Blurb staff are closing their eyes as they work on it, or they show each other a proof page as a 'can you believe it' sort of thing. 

Yours won't be perfect either. Nobody's book is perfect, no matter how much effort goes into it. So what? Start by producing a test book. You can see mine, with a photo of me holding the wine glass. Start. Pick a reasonable size and standard paper. Put in some photos that you think you might use in a story. High and low key. Portraits. Landscapes. Street. Your cousin's wedding. Whatever. Try different fonts and text sizes. Try different layouts. Play. Experiment. Have fun. If it isn't fun you're in the wrong hobby. 

If you must, your mantra will be "nobody else will ever see this". And then push the publish button. That is the most important step. Push that button. Until you do, you have nothing. Print your photos, and a book is a great way to start. Unless you get really carried away, you'll probably spend about $20 or $30, but could be less if you get a sale. When you get your book, (it typically takes less than 2 weeks) go through and write in it, what you like, what you don't, what you'd do differently. Then start the next book. Finish it. Hit the publish button.

A word about money, but first a digression about money. One of the things that really annoys me is people complaining about how much things cost. That all singing, dancing, app that will make your life better costs less than a cup of Starbuck's crappy coffee imitations, and the reviewer complains it's too expensive. People are always looking for the cheapest, and then they complain it won't do what they want, doesn't last, and they still go out and do it again. I laugh at them. 

There are other considerations in life beyond getting the thing at the cheapest price. I prefer to spend a bit more money and get a better thing more suited to my needs. Don't get me started about camera pricing. These amazing modern cameras, and people complain they're too expensive. Or film, people look for cheap film, then wonder why the results look terrible. Ante up people and quit your bitching. You don't get into a hobby like photography, or golf, or anything really, to save money.

My books are expensive, true, but I'm not trying to sell them. I mean, you could buy some of them if you really wanted, but you'd have to really want to. Even by expensive coffee table book standards, these are expensive. I don't care. I'm doing them for me. I am coming to like seeing my photos in print, and a book, even in expensive Blurb books, is cheaper than getting that number of photos printed. Much, much cheaper. I could get them printed in a smaller book, one that does not lay flat, but then the panorama images wouldn't be the same. That panorama photo of Tombstone takes me back there. Every time I look at it. My thinking is go big or go home.

This link should lead to a preview of the books for sale.

And for people who live in town, all they need to do is buy me lunch, and ask me to bring along the book they want to see. 

Another consideration, I'm getting to be an age where I'm thinking about what happens to my stuff when I die. It's sad to know that the hard drive that currently contains the data for about a quarter million photos and the computer driving it all, will be thrown into an e-recycling bin without a second thought. I would like to believe that someone seeing an expensive looking photo book will at least take it down and leaf through it. With any luck at all they'll think, 'hey, these are great', and take the book(s) home for a closer look. Anybody can look at a photo in a book or framed on the wall and like it or not. It takes the right hardware and software to 'see' a photo on a hard drive. 

And even if someone were to know the password to get into the computer, and could get Lightroom fired up, and figure out how I've got things stored, where would they start? And why would they? (Unless of course, I become famous, somehow.)

So if you're a photographer, and haven't seen your work in print, do it. Print a book. Do a calendar. As a gift to yourself take your best photo and go to a bespoke printer like Resolve or Royce Howland. You will be stunned and astonished at the results. It's almost certain the framing will be more expensive than the print. Indulge yourself.

My next book?  I'm still working on one for a private client, and we need to get together and figure out next steps. The untitled film project book is going to be hibernating till I've worked through at least part of the darkroom printing course I'm starting later this week.

There's two blogs. The other one is somewhat irregular (a hair under 4000 posts over 6190 days, or a post every day and a half or so), and could be on any topic under the sun. This blog is much more irregular, and is mainly of interest to photographers. If you'd like to be notified when I post for either blog, send an email to keith at nucleus dot com, or comment on the blog and ask to be added to the notification list. These people sometimes get a little something extra. Oh, and for current subscribers, thank you!