THE BOOK EDIT

Beatrice – ve por favor el primer el comentario, “comments,” para una traducción española de este mensaje.

Note: Images from scanned slides are not at their final quality.

To save time, we did a quick scan with no clean-up or color correction on the very large number of slides to create the 800x600 JPEGs Raul used for his edit. Before we make a book, David Burnham has generously offered to rescan those slides that need it and I will be cleaning up and color correcting the images for printing. (I have been taking printing workshops to improve my skills here.) If we were to hire an outside firm to do this work, the commercial price on getting a good scan done runs about $40 per slide or more depending on how much needs to be done.

Some photographers did their own scanning and sent me files ready to use. For example, you can see examples of what a final quality scan looks like with files provided by David, Lance and Darius. And Ben shot digitally, so he sent me final files as well.

Raul started the edit process with 328 pictures from 22 photographers. He requested that I send him 800x600 JPEGs for editing. From that he brought it down to the 183 most interesting pictures.

Click here to see these 328 pictures organized and named by photographer.

Then Raul created an essay. A testament to how many interesting pictures we all have, the essay included 130 pictures. The essay is meant to be viewed two images at a time. They are in sequence from beginning to end. Two images, one left page and one right page make one “spread.”

I thought 130 pictures (two per spread making a book with at least 65 printed pages before any text has been added) might be too rich for our budget, so I asked Raul to do a much tighter edit. And he created the second essay with 80 pictures. Because the pictures have been paired-up in “spreads,” they get removed by groups of two. I winced a few times as I saw some personal favorites disappear from the group, but it’s still a very strong essay. And at a starting point of 40 printed pages, this will allow me to keep our book dummy printing costs within the budget assigned to me.

Keeping with the spirit of learning from our workshop experience, I asked Raul to share his thoughts behind the essay editing process.

Comments from Raul Touzon on editing:

“As mentioned, I started with 328 pictures. I edited each photographer individually looking for fairly interesting pictures, not masterpieces, but pictures with a story to tell. I chose NO sequences as they would be too much for the book. i.e., Lance presented two sequences of pictures from the cantina, I edited them down to four distinct enough images to stand on their own, not as a sequence. The pictures also needed to have fairly descent composition. At the end of the process, some photographers had four left and some had twenty photographs left in their files.

Then I changed the names of the 183 remaining images to a numeric sequence so I didn't have a clue as to who the pictures belonged to. Next step was to organize them by event, and obviously there were a lot of repeats. i.e. the man in cowboy hat under the shaft of light in the Hacienda had like 10 different images, so I chose the one I felt was the strongest.

After that I started sequencing by pairs; in other words, pictures that flowed well from page to page. Once I did this, there were pictures that "fell off" just because the one next to it was so much better. In some instances the sections, i.e. The San Martin Procession, were just too big, so some of the weakest images of that particular event had to go. That is how I got to the 130. I feel that 130 is a good balance, again not every image is a masterpiece, but at least they are to a good level and I feel events and towns are well covered.

The second edit (80 images) was basically dropping all those images that I didn't feel strongly about. i.e. the beautiful picture of the Parroquia [main cathedral] lit at night that everyone has seen a million times....a beautiful image, but not one that was doing a lot for the book. Also some transition pictures were sacrificed, i.e. some of Liz's beautiful pictures of hands.”