The Book’s Finished!!
During this past week I spent a good amount of time going through all the images from last year’s 365 Project that I described in a previous post (365 Projects – What’s Next? ). After gathering all the images, the task of culling them to a number that would produce a reasonably priced book was harder than I expected, but nonetheless gratifying even in some unexpected ways.
There may be some good reasons for all of us to go through a process like this once in a while. It’s healthy to go back through a body of work and make decisions about what we’re going to include for publication in print (I gently put forth the concept that having photography in print is a different level of visceral connection to a work than on a computer screen; I may have to write a blog post about that concept). It certainly felt like a cleansing to me with a much more positive outlook on my work as a result.
First to describe the process that I used. I took the 365+ candidate images (there were some days, where I had several interesting images, so I included these for this process rather than prejudging). I assigned rating stars to all of the potentially publishable images, which wound up ranging from 3 to 5 stars. Including all the extra images, this resulted in 229 images at 3+ stars: too many! At this point, I did a quick re-scan to ensure that non of the 3-star images should have a change in rating and set the cut-off at 4+ stars: 164 images! Still way too many, as my target was slight less than 60, so that I could publish it in a 60 page book.
Another quick scan allowed me to get the number of potential images down to about 130, which was moving in the right direction.
Rather than continuing to pare down the number of images through this methodology, I decided to start formatting the book, which gave me the opportunity to get a sense of how the various images would work together on facing pages. As I did this, a sense of flow and story was developing, which resulted in a very satisfying end product (I’m still writing the afterword, but that’s a matter of another 30 minutes max) that will go out later today for production. I’m psyched!
Oh, almost forgot: go out and do something likes this for one of your projects and you’ll appreciate your own work a lot more!
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