MorseBlog

I spent the summer in Sandpoint Idaho with my Fuji GFX 50s ii medium format digital camera. My digital philosophy has been to retain and integrate the aspects of film that I enjoy so much. I tend to work with mostly manual lenses and not use a lot of the camera features and menus aside from shutter speed aperture and a new one for me, ISO. I made a series of earlier posts on some of my work which I list below. Old Glass  Lake Vibes Lake Morning June 5 2022 Trestle Creek August First Lake Pend Oreille I have travelled to this area over the years to visit my father and have always found the lake to be a challenge to photograph. It is predominantly blue in tone in the summer owing to many days of bright blue skies. The lake itself sits in a bowl of mountains that makes golden hour somewhat muted. This was an attempt to channel some of the mood of the lake and reflect that in my photographs. I found th...

As I mentioned in a previous post I had found some inspiration for a photography project that morphed into a small photobook. To recap the book will be hardcover in A5 (210mm x148mm) in landscape orientation. I am publishing this at Mixam my favorite photo-book publisher .  I received my softcover proof copies the other day and they came out nicely. I substituted one photo that I decided didn't look so nice. Since they were black and white images, I opted to print a monochrome book. The images came out nicely. I updated my minor changes and reformatted it for hardcover. This involves changing the number of pages and reshuffling a little to make sure the pages I wanted to land across from each still do. I use softcover to save a little money on the proofs before committing to the more expensive hardcover run. I have found with these softcover books with 32 sides (internal pages) 8 copies cost as much as one. So I order a batch of proof as they usually turn out well enough to give to...

I continue my hunt for the best self-published book maker and I think I have found the best for me. I have some earlier posts here and here about my odyssey of publishing  Three Wood Lands  my book on three Cambridgeshire woodlands. I started out with Blurb, the most obvious. They have a very nice 13x11 inch landscape hardcover. Other publisher like Lulu and Mixam seem to stop at A4 (8.3x11.7 inches) so if a large coffee table book is what you are after look to Blurb or Saar Digital. Still A4 is a great format. Blurb is basically pretty good quality and very high priced.  Recently in Reddit I noticed someone in in the UK had recommended Mixam for a zine (magazine) publisher. Not having heard of them before I looked them up. They do a lot of different printing tasks including hard and soft cover books, zines, posters, flyers, cards, almost everything. They have a great way of quoting work with a series of drop down menus to select the size, number of pages, paper options,...

I have done a small amount of different kinds of books. Some of the ones I did with Blurb can be found on the right hand column of the blog. I have also bound and cased in my own photo book from scratch. This entailed hand sewing the pages together, gluing in C-prints of my photos, casing in the book and wrapping it in book binder's leather. I was please for my first attempt though I picked the project up and dropped it over the years so it probably took 4 years to finish! So daunted I felt at various phases. Never-the-less a valuable experience. I also made a book from a text block I bought and then cased it in myself. I describe the process here . Another satisfying project that ended up as a gift. More recently I self-published a long story about a river trip with my brother. I had a good response to this and I have been in the process of editing it to make it a better story with the help of my cousin who used to be a book editor. This last project led me to revise what st...