The Book

01/28/2012

I have begun a massive project.
I hope I can get it done in some sort of reasonable time frame.
I decided to assemble my photographs into a static, published book.

My photos are all (at least up through about 2003, anyway) currently in albums, and fairly well organized and with nice layouts.

So, why the book? Two huge reasons:

One is that when assembling a photo album, you are limited to the print sizes you have if you don't want to get everything re-printed. I want my favorite photos to be full-page, full-bleed monstrosities. I want my less-liked photos to take up less real estate. I want blurry photos to be small enough that you can't tell. Events that have lots of interesting shots don't need to take up pages and pages; I can arrange them all onto one page and still see all the photos.

Reason number two is Photoshop. I have albums full of crappy snapshots (intermixed with some pretty great, high quality portraits, mostly taken by my dad). A crappy snapshot is album-worthy, but if I'm going to put it into a book, I'll be scanning it anyway. And once it's on my computer, I can correct all kinds of things: dust & scratches, colors, lighting, noise, removing unwanted elements.

This photograph is from when I was two, and is one of my earliest memories. It was a blurry, grainy, scratched Polaroid with dull colors (pretty much the description of every Polaroid photograph I've ever seen).

I didn't do much to it, and it will definitely be one of those that gets printed small, but it's so much more vibrant now. The scratches are gone. Hey, look! My Saltwater Sandals are red! I can honestly say I had never noticed that detail before editing the photograph.

I have a stopping point: May 2000. Any photos taken after that will go in the next book. I'm almost done with the scanning stage, which is huge in itself, but the editing of nearly every photograph and arranging them will take a ton of time. At least I don't have to organize them much; their arrangement in my albums was strictly chronological order.