Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Treasure Pond - a SoFoBoMo 2011 photo book

For a couple of days, I have done some work on a photo book project, inspired by SoFoBoMo 2011: "SoFoBoMo is short for Solo Photo Book Month - a group event where a bunch of photographers all make solo photo books start to finish in 31 days."

The title of the book is Treasure Pond, and a version of it is now available at the SoFoBoMo site in PDF format (13 MB file).

I started taking photographs on July 10th, and on July 12th I started the final typesetting and text writing. Today I tweaked the book quite a lot, deleting a dozen pages, improving the texts, and fixing mistakes. It was all done quite hastily, but I felt this was better than try to make a perfect book. With all the mistakes still in, at least I managed to finish the thing.

Some statistics: I took about 2800 photographs, of which 362 survived the first round of deleting. There are 75 pages, and 62 photographs were included in the book.

I'm still in the progress of checking whether something absolutely needs to be fixed in the photo book, so any feedback is welcome.

I'm planning to make a printed book using the VioVio service, which should accept a PDF file as input, eliminating the extra work needed in using Blurb. Of course, some problems may appear, but it is worth trying out.

Update: Using VioVio didn't work out - I should have checked the available paper sizes beforehand. Size 25x20 cm is not available, and I don't want to tweak the design of the book any more. So, I'll use Blurb as before, it should be relatively straightforward anyway.

Update 2: While doing the book composing in Blurb BookSmart, I noticed a problem on page 40 of the PDF, the photograph was slightly misplaced. I'll upload a new PDF as soon as I get the Blurb version worked out.

Update 3: I made some instruction-type notes about this year's SoFoBoMo experiences, I hope they are useful.

6 comments:

Andreas said...

Amazing, as always.

Juha Haataja said...

@Andreas: Thanks! It may be that there are still some corrections to be made to the book, but small mistakes I can live with.

Tess said...

Hi, I liked your photobook and the text to. A lot of nice photos.
It was a really fun way to make a photobook and really complete it and not just save the photos on the computer.

Anonymous said...

Superb! A beautiful collection of images. They are like "seeds taking to air like smoking embers".

Great work!


Art

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Jarno said...

Thanks Juha!
Especially those photos on the chapter title pages are beautiful.
I guess those flying creatures were not always nicely still..

Juha Haataja said...

@Tess: Thanks! Having a printed book, that is what pleases me most about this, it is just so much better than looking at the screen.

@Art: Thanks!

@Jarno: Indeed, when it is sunny you can easily freeze the motion, but when it is clouded things get complicated, even with a f/2.0 lens.