Working in a rather roundabout fashion I have now got back to this exercise. I have been rather more concerned with producing a physical book (not something I can do through the likes of Blurb given my chosen format) which has been taking up an inordinate amount of time. Turning to this exercise has been something of a light relief!
As I am now using Lightroom I thought I would start with the Book Module contained within it. Although it would appear to be a fairly simple matter if the book is to contain only photos it seems to be of another order of difficulty to incorporate and combine with text. There is no doubt a way of doing it but I have not found it yet. I have therefore fallen back on Blurb’s own Bookwright program and this has proved to be remarkably easy to use and I have come up with something, albeit not yet very refined, after just a few hours work.
As I have barely got off the ground with Assignment 5, for which I do intend to make a book, I have, for sake of ease, gone back to an earlier project and used the images produced for Assignment 3. For these I have adopted Blurb’s standard landscape format, one image per double page spread, on the righthand page alone, with the map reference captions. Simply for the purposes of experimenting I have also added a single page of text at the end which is a lightly edited version of the text that accompanied the final set in my blog post for the assignment. The only other addition is a title page: somewhat mockingly I have decided to call this book version “Sedes Memorabiles”, Latin for memorable seats, which of course ironically, not all of them are and even some of those with a memorial function are not easily readable by a general public.
I have no training in or prior experience of book design but I am well aware it is not a simple matter of putting some images and text on a page. What I see though from looking at photobooks in my own library is that for most keeping things simple is what works best. There are of course exceptions: William Klein’s New York book works precisely because it is busy and slightly disorienting: some of my favoured Japanese photographers’ works are also more successful because of their sometimes unorthodox presentation. I also just like the idea of one image per spread, or no more than one per page, with minimal text. I do not think my effort is anything that someone else would want to go out and buy but as an exercise, an experiment, and first dipping of the toes into the waters of making books, I think it is not bad. No doubt it could be refined further but I am otherwise reasonably pleased with it as a first attempt. Not to mention surprised at how relatively easy it was to put together.
Proof copies of the cover and main body are accessible below:
Mark Robinson's OCA Landscape, Place & Environment Blog 