My book of Yellowstone photos is done and printing!
It's amazing to me how much work these things take. After quickly throwing some images together I started a longer process of polishing it up, while teaching myself Adobe InDesign at the same time. My official 0.9 version has been uploaded to Blurb and ordered, and should arrive in time for Thanksgiving. This is the first time I've used Blurb and I have no idea how it's going to turn out. I've mentally prepared myself for it not turning out well so I'm fully expecting to have to adjust the colors and reprint it.
I like printing large so I went with their new premium paper and large format landscape size, which is 13 inches wide by 11 inches tall. That means a double-truck spread is 26 inches wide! (I included at least one full spread and a couple of 1.5 page spreads.)
While I was on Blurb's website I took a look at the boks that other people have published and shared. There are over 2,100 Fine Art books and 3,900 Travel books, so I'm not the first person ever to do this. Oddly, I don't see any way to sort the books which means most of them will never be seen.
While researching some data for the book I went looking for a good map of the Yellowstone. It turns out that there's a National Park Service office called Harper's Ferry Center, which is the map making division of the National Park Service. They make a lot of their maps available for download in the original Adobe Illustrator format! These aren't just small, low-resolution maps - these are the actual files they print the park maps and brochures from! Like all data created by the Federal Government, they are in the public domain.
I downloaded the full map for Yellowstone and then started hiding layers that just added clutter and ended up with a nice, clean graphic to use for the endpapers of the book. I'll let you know how it turns out.
PhotoShelter has recently rolled out some new gallery features and I've embedded a couple on my Portfolios webpage. I'm no web designer - that's for sure - but I've gone too long without anything on my webpage. Of course now I've gone overboard and shared WAY too many pictures, but it's a start.
Here's an example of their new embedded gallery with some pictures from my latest trip to Yellowstone:
I've gotta work on making that watermark less obnoxious...
A guy at work had a t-shirt that says "Lead me not into temptation" and then is smaller print below it says "(especially bookstores)". I need that shirt.
I was wandering the streets of Palo Alto after dinner Friday night when headed into the Borders to see if they might happen to have any ultra-cheap, beautiful photography coffee books on deep discount. :-) A boy can dream, right? Well imagine my surprise when I found Philippe Bourseiller's Call of the Desert for $12.95.
This is a really pretty, thick, large format coffee table book covering North Africa. It's really pretty to look at but there aren't many words in it. There are few stories about the pictures and the captions for the photos are all at the back of the book. There are no page numbers which makes it difficult to find things. Oh well - it's a pretty book.
This is a REALLY BIG BOOK, measuring 17 inches high by 14 inches wide. There are a lot of double-truck images which work out to about 27" x 17". This is a difficult book to read if you don't have a good way to support it! The text is OK and there's enough background on each picture to give you a sense of why it's in the collection.
I've now spent a lot of time going through the various photography coffee table books I've got, gathering design ideas for the book on Yellowstone images I'd like to put together. I've got more than enough source material - I just have to put it all together.