Ordinary Pictures

I ran across an few interesting blog posts about the book creation part of SoFoBoMo at Martin Doonan’s blog. It’s apparent that I’d better get to work on this book business. I really like Martin’s idea of a dry run with prints.

I’ve been working on-and-off for the past three months on getting all my black & white grain elevator images re/scanned and made ready for putting in a book. I have been roughing things out using Blurb’s Booksmart software and one of their canned templates. I haven’t seen a sample of Blurb’s output and have no idea what the quality is, so the decision whether to go with them for the final product, or just do it myself, hasn’t been made. I have found the Booksmart program a useful tool to get an idea of how photos will look in book form without actually having to print it or create templates myself. I thought it worth mentioning in case others are looking for a book program. BTW, you can print from Booksmart, but they add watermarks so it’s only useful for testing. I’d be interested to know if there are other similar or better tools out there like this that work out-of-the-box.

One thing the grain elevator project has taught me is that deciding on the order of images is the hardest part. Having the physical prints to shuffle would make ordering and re-ordering much easier and will give a better idea what the final product will look like. I’ll have to give it a try, but I’m also prepared to discover that even subtle changes in an image’s look in print might affect the final order.

Anyway, following Martin’s idea of a dry run, I think I’ll pick some related photos and try it out. The 2nd Street North set I have on Flickr would be adequate. If I can’t find the original scans, or those scans aren’t good enough for print, I’ll pick something else from the digital archives. At any rate, playing with the layout tools and the physical prints will help prepare my mind and hands for the real time crunch in May.

Wait a minute. I had decided on an electronic book, but I think I’m gravitating more toward a hard copy… More on this later.