PHOTOBOOKS PART 2: BEFORE YOU START
Everything you need to think about, plan and do before starting your photobook.
All Photo Credits: (c) T J Allen Art
Content / Story
The most important questions to ask are: What is your photobook about? What is it for? Who is it for?
Focusing on these answers will aid your decision making.
Here are a few ideas of what your photobook could focus on:
Travel and Events (journey/road-trip, pilgrimage, volunteering)
Historical (family past, family tree)
Project (house build)
Family Event (wedding, anniversary, 'this is your life', baby's first years)
Subject Matter
It is important to know ahead of time what you want / need to capture because you can't go backwards and magic-up relevant photos after something has happened. For example, if you are building a house, you'll want to be able to remember what the site or original building looked like before all of the changes took place, or if you've travelled to another country across the world, you aren't going to be able to quickly and easily nip back to take a picture of something you forgot to record.
You want your photobook to be interesting and captivating so plan what types of photos you need to take.
Here are a few ideas:
**NOTE: Check out the rest of the blogs in this series to see visual examples of the below**
Big picture vs small detail: take the big, dynamic landscape panoramas but make sure you also remember to get up-close, detailed macro shots for intricate features (zoom out and zoom in!)
Angles: seeing everything on the same level is a bit dull so be playful and remember to take pictures looking up at buildings or crouch on the ground to catch reflections in puddles. This makes for a far more interesting photobook
Unique sense of place: it's important to log details that are synonymous with the destination, whether that is in the form of local characters, street signs, or landscape features. Ask yourself what is similar but different from what you are used to seeing at home? Remember, a picture paints a thousand words and can evoke memories of smells, sounds, feelings, emotions etc.
Humour: 'remember that time when .....', all it takes is one image to re-live memories and spark dialogue of funny incidents or conversations, so make your photobooks fun. What do you want to make sure you don't forget?
Creative Themes: if you start to see a pattern of regularly occurring similar objects or places, turn it into inspiration. For example, if you keep seeing red objects, take pictures of everything red for a 'red-themed' page, or if you encounter lots of flowers, take lots of close-up details so that you have a floral selection for a page focused on colourful blooms
Backgrounds: it's great to use your own photographs as background images as it can tie in really well to your photobook story. These images need to be very plain and include subtle textures and colours so that they don't detract from the main images on each page. These photos can be anything from a close-up of a brick wall to tree bark to sand on the beach
Top Tips to Bear in Mind
Image Quality: crap pictures = crap photobook! Double check you are using a high resolution setting on your camera because the end result of your photobook relies on how good your images are
Image Quantity: too few = less choice, too many = even longer editing process. It's good to go through your images at the end of each day and delete all the blurry / unflattering ones. It will save time later
Purpose: pre-planning provides more considered content = better results. There is always scope to be spontaneous and creative while you go, but having some ideas at the back of your mind to draw upon will aid the process
Picture Prep
This is a bit like preparing walls for painting; it's time-consuming, tedious but fundamentally vital!
Hopefully you will have already deleted any obviously rubbish photos, so the next step is to categorise and order your images. If you are faced with thousands of photos, you need to edit them into bite-size chunks so that you don't reach overwhelm, lose the will to live and give up before you've even started!
Here are some easy steps to follow:
If you are nervous about editing / deleting your photos, copy your pictures and save in a 'photobook' folder on your desktop. This means your original photos remain untouched and any deleted photos that don't make it in the photobook will still be saved
Delete all immediately obvious photos, by which I mean, if you have 100 pictures of elephants, you aren't going to use every image in the book so go through and only keep a small selection of your favourites. Your photobook is supposed to be a showcase so the images need to be the crème de la crème
Create sub-folders and move relevant photos into each so that they are either in chronological order or by subject. For example, all photos from the first day should be filed in a folder called 'Day 1', second day filed into 'Day 2' and so on, or for a wedding put together all the images of the church in one folder, all the images of the posed group photos in another, all the images of the evening together etc.
Go into each sub-folder and edit again so you are definitely only keeping the best pictures. This is useful for when you come to plan your pages because you'll know what you have to play with for each double-page spread and also what photo layouts you will need i.e. how many images are portrait and how many are landscape
Final Note
REMEMBER: you learn as you go, the software evolves and your ideas will too, so have fun and enjoy!
Up Next .....
You will be relieved to learn that the main bulk of wording is out the way, so now you get to indulge in the (far more exciting!) visual examples across the rest of the blog series.