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. The official 0.9 version of the book 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 books 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.
Here are the eight different maps for Yellowstone that you can download.
Here are some notes about the maps which are also interesting.
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.