Category Archives: photography book

Seeing Everything

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OK, OK, I admit it. I severely underestimated the amount of work needed putting together the Norfolk project book. This week i added more images to the gallery for the project on my website, and it suddenly dawned on me the task that lay ahead. It’s pretty damn big.

I want to do a good job on this book. No, actually i want to do a fantastic job on this book, and it seems only right for me to take my time doing it. I have hundreds of images to go through, and i have to choose a total of 100 for the book. I can’t really do that without having some idea of what i’ve actually got. The images i’ve shown so far are just a fraction of what i shot. I haven’t really gone through the work in detail, apart from the occasional quick scan through the negatives and digital image files. I really need to collate all the work. I thought i could do it all in 3 months. Ha!

With that in mind,  i’ve decided to delay the release of the Norfolk project book until early 2013. It will give me this year to thoroughly go through the work and see everything, every last bit of the project. It seems pointless to rush the book, and I already have a book planned for later this year with images of Scotland, so i will produce a book in 2012.

I’m looking forward to exploring and producing images in an area of the UK i’ve never been to before. Scotland looks fabulous. I’ve already started using the impressive power of Google Earth to help me spot the best shooting viewpoints, check out the surrounding area and plan what images i want to take.

Retrospective Book

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I’m about to start on another photography book release via blurb.com that should take me most of the winter to put together. This is going to be a big project and an important landmark book (at least for me!) that completes the first phase of the Norfolk project.

Ten years ago, i decided that i needed a long term photographic project. What began as a loose kind of photography exercise in Norfolk, ended up gathering pace and direction. After ten years, it’s time for a break and some contemplation of where to take it next. I have lots of options open, plenty left to photograph in the county, and after a year or two i’ll return.

Over the next few months I’ll be putting all of the photography  together, around 80 images or possibly more, to make a retrospective book that , I think, will be the perfect way to present the first ten years of work. The majority of the photographs that have been released online have focussed on the landscape side of the project, however, the book will stay true to the original idea with a broad mix of landscape and documentary photography. I aim to release the book on March 21st 2012.

Book Delivery!

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Yay! My copy of Sea, Sky, Sand and Street arrived by UPS just now. I’ve had a look through and i’m very pleased with the results. I’ll be posting a review of my Blurb book making experience, and the results i got, in later post, however i thought i’d post some initial thoughts.

First of all the quality is excellent. Better than some photography books i own!

Good print tone (a slight green tint but OK) with deep blacks and plenty of detail in the images. The premium matt paper i opted for looks and feels good, adding that extra weight quality to the book pages. Text is crisp and accurately placed on the page.

The layout and whether it would survive the book printing and trimming process was a slight concern but i had little to worry about. There was a degree of flexibility in the design and the resulting printed version is around 98% true to the screen version.

A more detailed review will be posted on the main photoblog later this week.

Book: Sea, Sky, Sand and Street

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It’s with a great deal of pleasure that i can announce the launch of my first photography book release called Sea, Sky, Sand and Street available from blurb.com.

Based on this year’s Solo Photo Book month project, this brand new 7×7 inches (18×18 cm) photography book has been completely redesigned from scratch and features a new layout design, over 70 photographs including a number of new images and more.

For the next sixteen days (check out the book preview to spot why it’s 16 days) the soft cover version of book will be available to buy for the introductory price of £16.95 plus £4.99 postage. The sixteen day period will end on midnight September 10th when the price will return to £18.95. A hardback edition of the book is also available.

The new Sea, Sky, Sand and Street book in softcover and hardback can be purchased HERE

SoFoBoMo 2011 Debrief

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Phew! The hard work is over and the book is finished. Yep…  Solo Photo Book Month is over for another year – well at least for me it is – and it’s time to reflect on the book, the photography and the project generally.

This year i found it tough to come up with book ideas. I did have an plan of shooting the book in Norfolk as the dates for the start of the SoFoBoMo project coincided with my visit, however i thought i’d be using a regular digital camera or even 6×6 film. In the end though, the answer came in the shape of the iPhone. Small and light, it is the perfect instrument for capturing images quietly and quickly. It’s perfect for street photography and from that thought came the book. Combined with the Hipstamatic photography app it managed to create images with a black & white ‘Holga’ like aesthetic that i liked a lot. The photographs in the book are displayed as shot – NO PhotoShop work was done at all. Nothing was added or tweaked. A loose limit of forty to fifty images to be in the finished book was always the aim and the final total came it at a magical forty seven. Perfect.

The one element i’ve always loved about the Solo Photo Book Month project is the degree of control you have over what you do. The rules are simple and you enforce them yourself. You could cheat but why would you want to? You also set the level of difficulty and i did briefly consider that using the iPhone again might be being slightly lazy but, hey it suited the job. Many of the photos were literally see and shoot moments. Sometimes there is just no time for technical considerations. The photograph of the people crab fishing was a classic example of that. Within seconds of the photo being taken they had moved. A full selection of photographs from the book project (including many photos not eligible for inclusion in the book due to them being taken before the project commence date of July 1st) can be found in the Sand, Sky, Sea and Street gallery HERE

So has it been a good SoFoBoMo year for me? I think it has. In fact i would regard this as the best of the three photo books i have created for the SoFoBoMo so far. So what about 2012? Ah, well i do have some plans that are about 75% complete for next year and it will be the most ambitious and challenging book I’ve attempted yet. All i will say for now is….5×4. Highlands. Landscape. :)

Watch this space….

This year’s book can be downloaded and viewed at:-

http://www.sofobomo.org/book-558-Sand-Sky-Sea-and-Street

Soviet Winter

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kiev60shot

The view from my back garden. I took this photograph a couple of years ago using a Soviet Kiev 60 medium format camera. Although the camera is a basic, rather crude, type of camera, i’ve found that really enjoy using it. I think it’s the back to basics aproach to photography that the Kiev offers. No metering, no autofocus and no program modes – just a simple mechanical camera that’s devoid of technological distractions. You have total control over the image making process, and i like that feeling.

This winter, i’m going to start on a landscape project, and i’m seriously considering using the Kiev 60 as the camera for the project. I’ll be shooting using 50ASA film (Ilford Pan F probably) with the camera mounted on a tripod.  The choice of camera format will be important, so i may end up compromising and use two cameras. Maybe two separate projects running alongside each other might work better, one using the 6×6 Kiev and the other using the 6×6.45 Bronica ETRS.

The winter landscape projects will be released as a downloadable PDF book in late 2009/early 2010.