Photobook: Three Wood Lands

I made my first photobook back in 2008. It was a memorial to my brother's photographs and was sent to a number of friends and relatives. I made it with Blurb and subsequently did a few more. Now it seems to be all the rage on YouTube and elsewhere. It is trendy to print photos as well as everyone is tired of consuming images on screens and they want to hold something real. Now photobooks seem to be an extension of this. I agree! I think there is something special about holding a physical image.

Photobook Cover Spread

Here is a video overview of the book with it's content and my commentary on how I put it together and what I thought about the results. 

Three Wood Lands

Genesis

This past year I have been engaged in a project of woodland photography focused primarily on three local woodlands. I have written up my efforts here on this blog and most of the photos have shown up on my Flickr page.  

Objective

When working on a photobook I find it not much different than any other serious endeavor. It deserves some thought, time and application to get a satisfactory result. I always think it is best to start with a clear objective as this guides decisions. 

I started organizing when the idea for the book gestated and began to create a Flickr folder and put my woodland images there. I started out not being too choosey. I did not know what size of book I wanted at the time so I had no real limits in mind. The objective at this point was to collect the work I liked best. 

It turned out the range of photos was rather broad and as such was difficult to fit a narrative. I had photos from British Columbia, North Yorkshire, Wales, along with my three local woodlands (and others). As I thought about it more I found it would make more sense to narrow down to the three large woodlands I had done the most work on. These other photos, while nice were, outliers. I found the whole project came together once I committed to this decision.

Now I had a subject that I had some deeper connection with and had researched out of curiosity. I could curate this much more easily and place the subjects in a geographical and historical context to deepen the meaning of the images. 

Structure and Narrative

History:

In order to provide more local context I added a short history of each of the woodlands and woodlands in Britain generally. Not comprehensive by any means but enough to educate and satisfy some curiosity.

Seasons:

Since I did this project over a year I decided to discuss my experiences of the seasons in each place. I wanted to leave a set of personal impressions for those who cannot visit them. Again this is about context. I enjoy an image more if I can take it out of its isolation on the page and put it somewhere in the world.

Photos: 

Finally I had to display the photos. I decided a simple format that I adhered to for almost all images. Centered with plenty of border space and separation. A simple title for reference. It has been explained elsewhere that the reason why borders on pictures are needed is they isolate the image and allow you mentally to contemplate it as a separate, isolated entity. So I made very little use of full bleed images. 

The order then was very simply by categories each woodland. I did this because I wanted again to immerse the viewer in each physical context. I experimented within that with layout and found that color with color or black and white with black and white on facing pages worked best. Color and black and white images exercise different parts of the brain and mixing them on facing pages felt distracting and created unnecessary tension.

I reviewed each photo for quality and resolution. This meant re-scanning at higher resolution in some cases. More careful dust removal was also required on images that were particularly bad. I don't always perform dust removal when I do a quick scan on a roll as I don't know what I intend to do with the photos at the time. I would also make adjustments as I saw was required in terms of color or exposure. 

Photographers Perspective:

I kept lots of the nerdy photography details (film types, aperture, camera, shutter speed, etc) out of most of the narrative. I wanted nothing to distract from the places, the images, and their contexts. I did decide that some people would like to understand what I was feeling, thinking, and doing while out photographing. For this I created a section after the images. I used edited versions of some of the passages in my blog. I then gave page number references for those photos in the book adding another layer of context for the image. Finally I have a table in the back with more details of cameras and film used for those really interested. Then finally a few words about myself. 

Building the Book(s)

I went back to Blurb as I am familiar with the flow of tools. The book is their Large Format Landscape 13x11 inches (33x28 cm) format which is the largest they make. I used the middle of the line Premium luster photo paper, there are more expensive options. It is expensive with 94 pages costing me about $150. This places it firmly in the personal possession and a few select gifts territory. 

In the past I have used Blurb's Bookwright design tools but I have recently completed two small trade books with them which were mostly or completely prose. For these I decided to use Word as Bookwright is really poor with managing a lot of text. 

Because of the expense and knowing other people may wish to own a copy I opted to make another version with a different publisher. There are a wide choice of publishers such as Snapfish, Mixbook, and Saal with differing offerings and levels of quality and pricing. Many of them make you use their own tools. Lulu seemed to have a good variety of book formats but most importantly they have very low prices. So I made a book with them on the basis of what does low cost get you? 

I chose Lulu's largest photobook which is an A4 Landscape (11.69 x 8.27 in / 297 x 210 mm). 

I opted for a soft cover book with matte finish. They offer only 80gsm paper for the pages. It has more pages because of the smaller page size and comes in at 104 pages. Still this is priced out at about $20. This is something you could hope to resell at a profit. It will be interesting to see the difference in quality. 

Practical Tips and Comments

Blurb Comments

Blurb has a popular and pretty good service. They use HP Indigo printers (as do most others) which means they offer a flexible service with a few limitations. Here is a list I have personally encountered.

Inconsistent Print Quality--In the past Blurb has used different print shops around the world and consequently they all have differing levels of care in terms of quality. For me this has meant I have received books from different countries and when I have sent them as gifts they come from different printers. When I have visited those I had sent a book to a personal inspection found a few of inferior quality with brownish blacks and trouble about detail in shadows. They seem to ship everything from one place in the Netherlands for me in the UK now so maybe they have improved their supplier base. 

Expensive Shipping--Their cheapest shipping to me in the UK is $11.99 which means it costs more than a book in some cases. They send every book by Federal Express.  

Very high printing costs--As mentioned above their books are very expensive. In most cases the price seems very close to full retail. They seem to expect all the profit from one's activities. There are coupons offers to look out for, I got 50% off my first copy. 

Black and white images can have a green or magenta color cast--This is something I have seen and others have complained about. The only mitigation is to reprint and hope they do better, a very expensive proposition. This seems to be a characteristic of the Indigo printers. They use color ink to make gray scales as black ink-only printing does not have enough tonal range. You then are hostage to calibration discipline at the printer and paper type/color.   

The proof copy exceeded my expectations with regard to black and white photos. There is no detectable color cast on any of them. There are a couple of cases of blown highlights and blocked shadows that I need to see I there is something wrong with what I submitted. 

Lulu Comments

Being a smaller book I had to rework the Word file to the smaller page sizes and resize and reposition all the images and captions. This was about a half day's work. The flow is similar to Blurb's in that you submit a PDF from the Word file, then Lulu checks it for problems. You correct the problems then finally see a preview. Their preview is a little buggy with some images showing the broken image icon on occasion. They allow downloads of the publishing files and these seemed fine so I assumed this was a previewer problem.  

I will post a review of the Lulu version at this link...

Word Comments

Word works pretty well if you have a lot of text as well as images and you are familiar with it. The first tip is to make sure the document is set to 'High Fidelity' mode. Word's default is 220ppi images! This is done in the document options menu under advanced settings. 220ppi produces reasonably good images but not the best quality possible. 

Blurb does not warn about images with 220 ppi resolution, though a warning appears at lower resolutions which tells me the threshold for their internal checks on image quality is below 220ppi. You cannot interrogate Word about the dpi of imbedded images, either. You can however save the picture from within Word by right clicking on it. You can look at the saved picture to ascertain the dpi resolution of the image.

In the default image quality mode this turns out as expected at 220 dpi. In the 'High Fidelity' mode this results in 330 dpi which seems the best Word can give.  Since 300 dpi is the consensus for quality book printing this is fine.