Welcome to the third installment in this series. In the first two posts in this series on photo books, I have
discussed the format and frequency with which I make photo books, along with
how I use Instagram as a tool in helping me sort the photos I want to make into
books on an ongoing basis. In this post, I will be talking about photo book
themes and how I organise my photos in a way that helps me when it comes to
making a photo book.
Photo book themes.
Over the past five years, I have made photo books in varying
shapes and sizes, but up until having a baby, I just made photo books to
document our holidays. Each of the albums pictured above feature a different country (Spain, Scotland and France, in case you are wondering!) and there is a unifying theme in my front covers of sky. In all honesty, I don't think this was deliberate, it's just the natural outworking of my inclination towards taking photos of the sky! I had often thought about making more books of just our
daily lives, as I would have liked our children to be able to get a glimpse
into what life looked like before they came along. However, I just didn’t ever
manage to. Having a baby is such a significant life changing event that I feel
it has given me a renewed sense of wanting to document our lives more
consistently.
My current plan is to make a selection of photo books this
year which document daily life, our holidays and the growth of our daughter.
This is what my plan looks like for this year:
Instagram
books: I will print these every three months throughout the year in a 7” x 7” hardback format, designed with children handling them in mind.
Pregnancy &
Portrait Series: This book will include the blog posts I wrote at different
stages of my pregnancy, alongside the weekly portraits I have taken of Ruby
since she was four weeks old, as part of The 52 Project.
The Stories of our Days:
This is an idea that was inspired by Pink Ronnie. I loved her idea of
documenting family life during each season of the year, accompanied by photos
reflecting the seasons, both in nature and in the family. Initially, I was not
sure whether I would have enough to say about our small family of three to
constitute making an entire photo book, feeling like our days often look very
similar to oneanother. And yet, in these seven short months since our daughter
was born, I am frequently aware of how things change regularly in a subtle way,
and if I do not write about them, it’s these small details of life that I know
I will forget about in years to come. I am envisaging that this photo book will
feel a little bit more like a journal, as there will be chunks of text as well
as photos. This book will tell a greater story of our year than the Instagram
books will, as they will tell the stories behind the pictures.
So that will be six photo books in one year. While this
might sound like a lot in terms of the time and energy that goes into making
each book, a lot of the process has already happened in that the Pregnancy
& Portrait Series will be made up of one photo for each week of this year.
I have already created a folder for each of these photos, so when it comes to
making the book, all of the photos are organised and in one place. The same
goes for my Instagram books.
Even if you choose to make books without particular themes
to them, if you have in mind that you are working towards making a photo book,
each time you transfer photos from your phone or camera to your computer, you
could select a few favourites and store them in a folder designated exclusively
to your photo book pictures. This would then save you a lot of time when it
comes to putting the book together.
With or without text?
With or without text?
One of the things that I loved when I first discovered
Blurb, was the option of adding text to photo books. Back in the days when I
made photo albums, I would write labels to accompany photos so that I would
always have a reference point for where I had been when I took a photo. So when
I realised that I could not only do this, but write whole paragraphs to help
tell more of a story to go alongside the photos in Blurb, I was even more
excited at the prospect of making photo books. The first album I did this with
was a slight disaster. After a wonderful honeymoon in Barbados , I spent many hours
collating the photos to go in a great big, 12” x 12” photobook, and writing
about the adventures John and I had. However, when the book arrived, we
discovered that I had made an embarrassing number of spelling mistakes (I
misspelt ‘helicopter’ about four times in different ways, I kid you not). Since
then, I have mostly stuck to just including photos without text. But, as I
mentioned before, I am keen to tell the every day stories of our lives, and so
I intend to write more for photo books, making sure I edit them carefully
before publishing!
My Instagram books don’t include any text, except for the
Title Page. In the format that Blurb offers, there is enough space for me to write
the names of the places that are represented in the photos throughout the book.
I saw the idea to do this on a very detailed blog post about how to make an
Instagram book using Blurb. I love the idea of doing
this, as it serves as a lovely reminder to me of all of the adventures we have
been on in each quarter of the year. I realise that sometimes we will have
mostly adventured in our city, and at other times, we will have ventured
further afield. I think it will be interesting to see the ebb and flow of our
adventures over time.
Photo Folders
Whatever the method you choose to use to organise your
digital photos on your computer, my main pieces of advice would be:
1) Keep
it simple and manageable.
2) Upload
new photos to your computer on a regular basis.
3) Back
up your images on an external device regularly.
The simplest way I have found of organising my photos on my
laptop is by having folders for each month of the year. Within each of these
folders, I have sub folders which separate my photos into categories. Here’s an
example of what this looks like from June this year:
The methods and processes that I use to make my photo books
are ones that have changed and formed over time, and I am certain that there is
other more methodical and systematic ways of organising photos. I am also sure that my ideas for photo books may well change from one year to the next as my ideas develop and our family grows. I would love to
hear from you in the comments section if you have any great ideas to share with
me and the other readers of my blog on the subject.
Next week, I'll be sharing a few simple programs and apps that enable you to do basic editing of your photos that I have found useful.
Thank you for this post on photo books! I frequently make photo books myself and such tips are always useful, and I enjoy hearing how others go about it :)
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