Booking it

No, not Trump. I'm sick of that whole dumpster fire in a train wreck. (And, and, IT WAS A CIRCUS TRAIN!!)  ((I hope you saw what I did there.))

Back to the story at hand. I've been busy working on books. The first was a test book just to work through the process of actually producing a book through Blurb, without any pressure of producing a 'perfect' book. Only a couple of my readers have seen that one, though it turned out better than expected. I'd show it to you if we met up, and expressed an interest.

The second was a big, BIG lay flat book called, Memories of Sunset at the Arctic Circle. In some ways this was a test as well, but really, I wanted some photos on paper. I am proud of the book and showed it to several people, with nice oohs and aahs of appreciation. The surprise was one person buying it on the spot. Not waiting for a second edition to fix a couple minor things, and tweak some wording. No, they wanted that one, right then.

I hadn't expected anyone to actually buy it. After all, most people would think it an extremely expensive book, even by coffee table photo book standards. But if I had wanted to take the photos to Resolve to be printed, I'd probably spend at least $5,000. One of them by itself would probably be $1,000 on nice paper. And that doesn't include framing, which is the expensive part of it. A book looks really inexpensive in comparison. And the photos look amazing!

So who am I to argue when people want to give me money? I went back to the digital drawing board, did the couple things I knew I wanted to fix, and found a few other things to be tweaked. In the mean time my mom reminded me that she had done the drive up the Dempster, so I asked if she wanted a copy. She did, so I printed two. One is arriving at her place on Thursday or so UPS says. I'll get my copy same time. I already have one person wanting to take me to lunch to see it and talk about a book for them.

The next book is a secret project that won't come to fruition for a little while, but I think it will be a very nice surprise for those involved. (That's not the going to lunch book.)

The fourth book is another test book that might lead to a potential collaboration with a private client. I'm about to send that one off to be printed, probably later today. When I think I'm done, I like to sleep on it, and look at it with fresh eyes in the morning. There is always something more to tweak; a little whoopsie how did I miss that! (And that's not the going to lunch book either.)

I'm thinking about the next book. Doing them is fun! It's making me go back to look at photos. Several things happen. I sometimes tweak the star ratings, wondering why I had given that many stars, or hadn't done so. In some cases I wonder how I overlooked a particular photo. Some need to be tweaked to fit the space better, which is sort of a chicken and egg thing.

But the main thing is thinking about them differently. Until recently, photos were an individual thing. Even photos taken in the same day, or on the same road trip didn't have any particular relationship to one another. For example, scenic photos of a train crossing the wide prairie with dramatic clouds could have happened on any number of trips, and putting them together could be a story that might appeal to train fans, but it isn't a story about a particular road trip. The Dempster book is the story of a particular road trip, with only photo taken during it, but there are any number of photos taken on that road in two other trips that I could have used.

So now I'm thinking about what stories and photos go together. This is different than the blog, which could have text and photos that go together, but often doesn't. You never know what you're going to get with the blog. The blog is a digital artifact that could go away in the bloop of a hard drive failure or internet meltdown.

A book is more permanent. You don't need technology to read a book. People expect things from a book, especially if they've paid for it. Which is another thing. Books have got stupid expensive, and the authors aren't getting much of it, and don't get me started on the AI plagiarism machines.

I digress. Thinking about the next book, (outside of the two potential client books) wondering what story I want to tell, and who I want to tell it to. I am under no delusions that I'm going to sell lots of books and make a ton of money. That isn't the point. Somewhere along the way I read "A photo isn't alive until it's printed." I've been thinking about that. I have just under 200K photos in my Lightroom catalog, of which fewer than 30K have been edited, and only about 100 have been printed in some form or another, the majority in books.  

Most recent photos are chasing some bees, though I had the wrong lens. It was sort of an accidental thing anyways. That one bee was just hanging out, maybe keeping an eye on me.

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Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Driftwood (BC)

This is the 'bridge' I scrambled over on the way down the beach because I didn't want to get my feet wet. Coming back I didn't care because I'd walked in a stream to get to a waterfall. 

Flower

Peony

Yukon

Smoke blowing in along the highway.

Film (new)

Not what you'd call a typical photo scene. I'd no idea how this would turn out, and am somewhat pleased. 

Film (old)