PHOTOBOOKS PART 8: OTHER THINGS TO CONSIDER
Humour and sophistication . . . I promise, you can do them both in the same book!
All Photo Credits: (c) T J Allen Art
Themed Humour
Who doesn't love a bit of tongue-in-cheek humour?! I love to be playful with my photobooks and add in a page of something that is guaranteed to crack the corners of my mouth into a smile. (Yours too hopefully!)
The photobook page above shows two examples that are very common occurrences while on safari that you just have to let go and laugh about. Firstly, you'll often get set up for a great shot and then someone else will move into your viewfinder with their own camera, thereby blocking your own photo. Secondly, the wildlife have an uncanny ability to show you their derrière rather than pose beautifully for the camera! Sometimes, it's these imperfect images that deserve centre stage because they bring about a jovial lightness to the photobook.
As for comical signage and entertainingly-named foreign food items/products in supermarkets, they are begging to be photographed and put in print for some guaranteed laughs!
You've got to love quirky signage!
Colour vs Monochrome
Unless you physically change settings, all your photographs will be taken in colour but it's worth remembering that you can alter your images and change them to black and white. For some photographs, a black and white atmosphere will shoot them off the scale in terms of presence, power and punch compared to their original colour version. Images with very intense lighting or objects with strong contrasts work best (e.g. deep black or bright white animals, like a swan on dark water with mist). You can get a feel for how this works in the gorilla examples below.
While it is great to have dedicated pages to your black and white imagery, it's worth considering how you might be able to blend them alongside colour photos on the same page. I've shown two examples below that have very different look-and-feels because I've tailored them specifically to the subject matter and how the images call out to be displayed.
For the sharks, I've used a background that looks a bit like sparkles on water to make it contextual and applied masks to each image to seamlessly blend and fade them into each other. By having the black and white photos and the colour photos on the diagonals, I've created balance and symmetry to the pages and generated added interest with the dual colour-scheme.
For the historic family page, I've used a photo of my grandma and great-grandparents house as it looks in the present day (hence the colour image) and included black and white photos of them (including the same doorstep) from when the photographs were taken many decades earlier. By adding ornate, swirly masks to these images, there is an enhanced sense of yesteryear.
