MAKING A BOOK - PART THREE

I am feeling very pregnant with this book project. I'm over the morning sickness -- too many emails and blog entries all over the place. I'm through the first trimester and with the edit, I feel like I seen the sonigram -- it's taking shape. But, now it's settling in that I have several months ahead of very hard and uncomfortable work. Now that we have the book edit...let's review what we've done so far.

What Kind of Book Do We Want?

At the start of our book project, I asked you all about what kind of a book would you want. The options I put out there were a) Greatest Hits – top 2 to 4 photos per photographer like the final show from our class with equal representation for each photographer; b) Essay – tell a story about our time in San Miguel de Allende with an unequal representation but at least one photo per photographer. I had one strong vote for and four strong votes against option (a) with a lot of enthusiasm for option (b). So, I pushed forward with the essay style of book with Raul Touzon as our editor. There was a suggestion to do a cookbook which I thought would be an interesting follow-on project, but would not work for this book. There was a suggestion to do a collection of sequences, but since our workshop did not have that as an objective, this would not work out as a group book project.

I also asked you whether or not you’d consider publishing our results as a commercial book. You all agreed to this with profits going to the Bibliotheca in San Miguel de Allende. But, as a result, two photographers did not submit certain pictures for our book as they had already committed those pictures to photography contests.

Once I have our book dummy done, and I see how the pictures look printed, I will be considering the commercial book option. See also comments from David Alan Harvey about making a commercial book with our pictures.

Submissions

I asked everyone from the workshop to submit between 10 and 15 pictures to be considered for a group book. The idea being that each person would have at least one picture in the book. Some people sent me more than 15 pictures and if they were already scanned, then I sent them on to Raul for consideration. I did not want to ask David Burnham to commit to a greater number of slide scans than he already had. In the end, I had 316 pictures from 22 photographers which were about 14 pictures per person. The number of pictures from each person ranged between 9 and 23. I also asked each photographer to rank their pictures so they could see how their choices compared with Raul’s.

Scanning

19 out of 22 photographers shot pictures with slide film and three shot digitally. This means that most of our pictures are scans of slides. Scans of duplicate slides introduced problems. Scanning slides is difficult to do well. For example, take a look at good scans from David Burnham, Darius and Lance. They each worked very hard on them. To get a better scan, David often has to make two passes on a slide—one for highlight and one for shadow—and then combine the results with masks in Photoshop. This is very, very time consuming. Most of our scans were one-pass scans. I can improve these with color correction in Photoshop without re-scanning. However, some will need to be re-scanned from your original slides as the duplicates you sent in were not very good.

Some folks were very disappointed with their scan results. Keep in mind…when you view slides, this is the best your picture will ever look. Most computer screens and all printers are not able to reproduce all the colors in your slide. Once you scan it, and then print it, it just gets worse. Not that the picture was bad—no. It’s just that the colors represented in the picture look different when illuminated as with a slide versus reflected light as with paper.

Raul’s Picks for Most Interesting Pictures

Raul Touzon then went through the submissions from each person. He chose your “good pictures”—all those he thought were interesting for an essay. This was a great opportunity to compare our rankings and choices with Raul’s. In the end, we went down to 183 pictures to be considered for the essay. As Raul said, not each of these pictures was a masterpiece, but they were all good pictures. The number of pictures from each person was generally cut in half to about 8 pictures per photographer. However, the two professional photographers from our workshop, Ben Krain and David Burnham, made good choices: each photo they submitted made it into Raul’s top picks.

The 130 Picture Essay

As Raul said, he combined our 183 good pictures and renamed them so he no longer knew which pictures belonged to which photographer. He then placed our photos into a sequence and eliminated redundant pictures. With 130 pictures in the essay, we had about 6 pictures per photographer—Ben with 18 pictures, nine photographers with 10 to 5 pictures, and twelve photographers with 4 to 1 pictures.

Here’s what I noticed as I was doing an inventory…if a photographer had submitted many pictures of the same situation (for example, David Burnham sent in many cowboy portraits and Lance Rosenfield sent in two strong sequences from a bar), many of those pictures were eliminated due to redundancy. Not because they were bad pictures—only because there were too many of the same thing. By contrast, most (18 out of 23) of Ben’s pictures remained in the edit because he had such a wide variety of shots. He had good pictures from each day of the workshop and often he shot scenes that no one else had shot.

The 80 Picture Essay

I pushed on Raul to give us a tighter edit, so he did an 80 picture essay. This version of the essay did not really add anything to our project and created some problems. First, two photographers were eliminated. So, my criteria of at least one photo per photographer were no longer met. Second, a couple of you expressed dislike for the shorter essay—it became “cowboys and kids” losing the feeling of San Miguel de Allende. Third, David Alan Harvey said that the shorter 80 picture essay was still not the right essay for a commercial book. Fourth, Raul felt the 130 picture essay was the better essay. So, I decided to use the “best essay” for our book dummies which was the 130 picture essay.

Book Dummy for the 130 Picture Essay

A book dummy is the book printed in low volumes—in our case, about 25 books will be printed and bound to distribute to us. A book dummy could be a PDF file, but that does not tell us how pictures will look printed…and we need to see them printed. My plan for the book dummy is one picture per page with two pictures per spread in a landscape format with a preferred page size of 9”x11”. I will layout the pictures centered in the page with photographer attribution and with your crop….which means there will be no full-page bleeds because these require me to crop your pictures. More pictures may drop out at this point because they do not print well. I will be posting more notes about the printing process for those interested.

See Also:

MAKING A BOOK - PART TWO