Good book tips

http://digital-photography-school.com/5-top-tips-for-designing-good-photo-book-layouts

1) Less is More

Don’t try to crowd in a lot of photos in a single layout, give your photos some breathing room. In fact, consider placing a single photo per page. It allows your photo to take center stage.

If you are planning to create a whole spread with several photos, think about the end size of your photo book. A very common size offered by photo book companies is an 8 x 8 inch book. How many photos to put into a spread should correlate to the size of the book. For example, laying out 12 photos on a single spread (two facing pages) of an 8×8 inch book is going to print very differently from 12 photos on a single spread of a 12×12 inch book. Doing the former may make each photo appear rather small in the final product and you don’t want folks squinting at your layouts. If you don’t have the benefit of a large monitor, so you can zoom to actual size, many companies display the measurements of your photos so if you have to, grab a ruler so you can see what end size you’re going to end up with. I typically don’t try to place more than 6 to 8 photos on a single spread of an 8 x 8 inch book and even then, you probably don’t want to do that for every page.

2) Establish a Focal Point

If you have a beautiful photo of which you’re especially proud, as mentioned in #1 above, highlight it by letting it have its own spread. Place it in a full bleed spread, or if the book size you’ve chosen is going to cut off key areas of your photo, then choose a container size smaller than the spread.

Another way to establish a focal point when you have more than one photo in your layout is to display one or two larger photos with smaller supporting photos.

A big pet peeve of mine is when companies provide very boring, unimaginative stock layouts based on the number of photos you want to lay out. If you place your photos into a layout of eight equally sized photo boxes, which photo is the focal point? Not to say that a layout like that would never work, but picking one or two photos to highlight tells your viewers the focus of your design.

3) Vary your spreads

I have done a “portfolio” type book where I only placed a single photo per page, and that makes sense with that type of book, but if you’re doing a book of an event like a birthday or graduation, you’re most likely going to place more than one photo per spread. Try to vary your spreads so the viewer doesn’t get bored. With that said, I often reutilize a layout more than once, but scatter it throughout the book. Similarly you can take your layout and reconfigure or make a slight change to it so it doesn’t look exactly the same. By reusing layouts, you can quickly design your spreads. The key is to not bore the viewer.

4) Tell a Story

Just as with any other book, your photo book is meant to tell a story, especially when making a photo book of your vacation photos for example. When you show off your vacation photos, you’re sharing your experiences with your family and friends. You want to make them feel like they were on the trip with you – seeing the sights, taking in the picturesque views. Think about how you want to tell your story. The typical event-based book will likely be chronological. But don’t be afraid to break from that, by grouping photos that make sense together for impact. For example the following layout highlights all the delicious food we ate on vacation!

5) Do your Prep Work Ahead of Time

Designing your pages will be easier, if you haven’t upload all 1000 photos from your event or trip into the photo book design software. You’ll easily lose your mind going through all of them. I’ve found that in a 100-page book, about 300 photos are more than enough and even then I don’t end up using all of the photos. Edit down the number of photos to the best ones, or the ones essential to telling the story you wish to convey. Also make sure you’ve done your post processing using your own software before uploading, as there are typically very few in-program photo-editing tools.

Drink Aware

Snapshot aesthetic

Snapshot aesthetic

"The vast majority of twentieth-century photographs have been either photojournalistic images or snapshots taken by amateurs. The least self-conscious or sophisticated of photographic approaches, amateur snapshots follow certain conventions determined by the camera itself and by popular ideas about what a photograph should look like.
Snapshots are almost invariably views of people or the landscape, made at eye level, with the subject in middle distance and in natural light. The central placement of the subject often allows random bits of reality to sneak into the edges of the picture. It is this unplanned “marginalia” that endows some snapshots with a complexity and humanity otherwise achieved only by the most skilled professional photographers.
During the 1960s and 70s, this naive but powerful approach exerted a tremendous influence on art photography. The originator of this aesthetic was Robert Frank, who in 1958 published a book of black-and-white photographs called The Americans. This Beat-era, on-the-road vision of America as an amalgam of parking lots, gas stations, backyards, and small-town politicians and their constituents was simultaneously a compelling and a damning look at the frequently romanticized small-town American scene. Frank’s project was revolutionary not merely for his sometimes mundane subjects but also for the relatively straightforward style of his pictures. Although it rejected the ennobling, even mystical aims of Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and other pioneers of straight photography, the camera-derived, unembellished snapshot aesthetic is a tributary of the straight photographic mainstream.
The irony and detachment inherent in the snapshot aesthetic aligned it with pop art, which was developing at the same time. Both took as their point of departure the world as it is, rather than as it ought to be. Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, for example, produced pictures about American rites, foibles, and obsessions previously unexplored by photographers. Their often random-looking compositions attempted to embody the flux and flow of rapidly changing contemporary lifestyles, usually with tongue-in-cheek humor. The apparent artlessness of such work masked its own conventions, including the production of relatively small prints and virtually exclusive use of black-and-white—rather than color—film."

Extracts from 'Artspeak' by Robert Atkins (http://www.moca.org/pc/viewArtTerm.php?id=35)

Natasha Caruana - Married Men

Natasha Caruana - Married Men

 

"Natasha Caruana’s series of photographs, ‘Married Man’ documents occasions when the artist arranged ‘dates’ through dating websites designed for married men to conduct affairs. She photographed each man, concealing their identity, but also recorded them secretly using a digital recorder hidden in a red purse seen in several of the pictures. Caruana asks why the ‘dates’ are willing to put their legally binding relationships at risk, as well as what an artist’s ethical responsibilities should be.
Like Phil Collins, Caruana’s work also asks what the ethics and politics of a ‘documentary’ mode of working are assumed to be. ‘Married Man’ might be thought of as almost a thematic negative of Cindy Sherman’s work: the desiring male subjects’ expectations and fantasies of womanhood are exposed, rather than the range of roles which women are asked to adopt.
The artist asks us to behave like a detective when looking at each photograph, searching for clues about the situations. In one, a man pays for a meal in cash- so that no evidence is left for his wife to discover, an old battered table in a tired pub suggests the ‘date’ has little concept of romance. In a third, which looks like a domestic setting, 1970’s style pineapple rings adorn the artist’s plate of food. The photographs were taken on a cheap disposable camera rather than professional equipment, so all the images are intentionally grainy and loosely composed, but each has been carefully printed by hand."

Alistair Robinson, Curator. The Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art.

(http://natashacaruana.com)

“My wife? It’s my second wife. I met her on the train, at Euston... Erm nothing’s gone wrong actually, I just like difference.” So says one of the subjects in Natasha Caruana’s cheeky, thought-provoking project, Married Men.

(http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/project/1936264/natasha-caruanas-married#ixzz1hBK1h2dK)

"Caruana went on dates with 80 married men over the course of two years, grabbing clandestine photographs of them with a disposable camera and recording their parting shots with a Dictaphone hidden in her purse. On one level a typology of adulterers, it’s also a complex investigation into the boundaries of trust, deception and betrayal.“The whole thing is ethically questionable – I’m taking pictures of a private moment, but then they’re putting themselves online [to find a mistress], and they’re cheating on their domestic lives,” says Caruana. “But what happens when I put the images on a gallery wall or in a book? That’s when the audience starts to question the morality of the whole thing, and that’s where it becomes interesting.“So much depends on what your assumptions are, and what your experiences of affairs are, but I thought a lot about the ethics of it,” she continues. “I bumped into one of the guys a few months after our date, sitting a couple of rows ahead of me in the theatre with his wife. I had to leave. I couldn’t take it at all.”Caruana found the men via three websites that put men in touch with prospective lovers in return for a fee. After chatting with them online for a while she’d arrange to go for coffee or a meal, spending an hour or so in their company. At some point she’d fake a reason to take a photograph, remarking on the beautiful flower arrangement or cake, then deliberately include them in the frame.She kept their identities a secret, avoiding photographing their faces and keeping the voice recordings muffled but, even so, it’s the details that fascinate. There are bad-taste jumpers, sad bunches of flowers, missing wedding rings, bills paid with cash and ever-present mobile phones, all in the seemingly banal environment of London cafés and restaurants."

( http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/project/1936264/natasha-caruanas-married#ixzz1hBOy2eHq)

I love this body of work, from the concept to the aesthetics of the images, although they adhere to a snapshot style the compostions are still exceptionally strong and encourage the viewer to really look at the details which in reality reveal key information about the subjects.

I have been considering mybe presenting my images in my book in black and white but after re-visting this body of work, and other series of a simular nature by Billingham and Day and so on, i have decided that colour is an important element of the snapshot aesthetic photograph as very often the colours are all over they place indicating the spontinity of the event.

Me: What are your intentions with me?

MM: I've no idea yet

Me: Okay, fine I just wondered

MM: Who knows yet... but its fun right

Me: Okay good

MM: 'Cause is fun, 'cause it's fun right…. It needs to be fun.

Me: [Laugh]

MM: No, but it just needs to be fun.. its erm…I mean it can't… erm.. there's a finite amount of time I've got… that erm... you've got…and I've probably got more than you at the moment… 'cause I've got, I've got slightly more control over my….. erm….situation. Ok Give me a kiss... Mmmp..

Me: Bye…I'll see you later

MM: Yes very much later by the sound of it… I mean bloody hell!

Over the course of five months I went on thirty one dates, never really being able to take more than a couple of images at a time to ensure my married dinner date did not get suspicious of me. This series is a final edit from around eighty images, representing these encounters.

The imagery is created using a disposable camera. This use of the snapshot connotes a sense of something being recorded that shouldn't be seen, hurried moments of an unfinished meal, an empty seat or an obvious gesture of anticipation. I required the images to represent a poetic realism, not wanting the shots to be too formally constructed; allowing them to be loose and be true to the essence of the captured scene.

\

Nan Goldin

"You do anything long enough to escape the habit of living until the escape becomes the habit"

These images are particularly inspiring for me on this assignment as aesthetically they utilise similar effects i wish to encorporate in my images of the city at night.
There is slight blurr in some images and the colours are inconsistent. Some images are grainy wheras others are much sharper.

Pictures of books

i went to the library and picked out a few books which i liked and took photographs. Each book appealed to me for different reasons. I liked the one above due to it's shape and size.

This book, felt much more like a brochure/ magazine. It was relatively small, and thin. The main thing i liked about this book was the matt pages which felt almost like recycled paper.

This book really stood out as i loved the typography, the contents page and the numbers in particular. 

the two images above are of a book i pulled out as i was drawn to the textured cover. I am not sure i am able to achieve this effect with my book but it is something i would definitely like to consider.

the two images above show nice examples of typography i liked.

again, another book with a textured cover, this one was like fabric had been stretched over the cover.

I liked the simplicity of this book design, there is another image lower down which shows the front cover, i like the minimal high contrast black and white look.

I liked this book as it was small but really thick and chunky which allowed the spine of the book to host a photograph.

i liked this layout, quite modern, clean and simple. it's relatively graphic yet it doesn't distract from the image.

this one stood out due to the bright metallic gold cover.

again, another clean and simple layout i liked.

in contrast to the minimal look, i quite liked this layout also, more hectic and chaotic but equally as engaging, when viewing images in this format it is more of an interactive experience with our eyes tracing the pages taking in all the information, with layouts like the example above we spend more time with one image.

i loved the bind of this book, i like the typography and how it leaks over the sides.

another more chaotic but interesting layout, i like the way the images are displayed here.