Thread: Any year end Photo Books?

Although my discipline was flagging, I finally got it together to assemble of book of my favorite work from this year. Seems to be an end-of-year project in lieu of photo albums so I'll have an easily browsable record of my year in photography. I'd already done a book in the Spring of the loads of shooting I did during the month I spent in NYC in April. That was my major photo project of the year, so another book seemed almost beside the point, but I did a lot of other shooting this year as well that I wanted on paper, so I took a day and pulled this together.

The book can be viewed here: 2012 - In Photos by Ray Sachs: Arts & Photography | Blurb Books

You can view it online, but the quality is pretty iffy depending on the size of monitor you're using. There's a PDF version that can be downloaded for $5, but I'm not trying to make any money here, so if anyone would like a copy of the PDF to browse, I think you should be able to download it for free here in Google Docs: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzYb...JpV3ppN1U/edit. The quality of the PDF is quite good and extremely scalable - I can open the images up as single images on my 27" monitor and they still look great, even though that's far larger than the published prints will be in the hard copy of the book.

Anyway, have a look if you'd like. And if anyone else puts together anything like this, feel free to add links to this thread. I love seeing people's work on the site as it comes along, but there's something about a year end retrospective that's can be really fun to look through.

-Ray

After seeing Lightmancer's post a week or two back, I've started going through my flickrstream to see what my favorites are. I'm hitting delete on a lot of photos, but I'm also finding more of them that I like than I thought I would. I almost never visit my old photos, but am quite enjoying it. The problem is that I seriously overcooked a lot of them (and I still do from time to time.....so much for learning from one's mistakes) so I'll want to reprocess some. But I think a book is a great idea. I'll share my results when I finish up.....hopefully this month, so I can start the new year with a clean slate.

I doubt I missed many of your shots Ray, but I'll definitely have a looksie at work today if it's slow.

Very nice Ray! I keep telling myself that I need to do this.. storage media will change but books have lasted us so far.

Originally Posted by Isoterica

Very nice Ray! I keep telling myself that I need to do this.. storage media will change but books have lasted us so far.

I guess that's another reason to do this, but I just do it because I like having them on hand to look at. I'm not likely to go digging back through old photos in the depths of my hard drive while at my computer. But every now and then it's nice to pick up one of these books and leaf through it over a cup of coffee or something. I look at them occasionally this way - otherwise I probably wouldn't. I tend to get sick of my stuff when I'm just through working on it, but after some time has passed, I tend to enjoy it again. Like seeing an old friend.

-Ray

This is a really great idea. I guess the hardest part is going through your catalogue and choosing the images you want, and then deciding in what sequence you want to display them. No small task, that.

Very nice Ray, I will browse through in more detail later.

Last night I was also trying to put together a very small "best of 2012" collection, right now I've got it down to ~25 images. But I'll think about expanding the selection and printing a book for myself - although I already have many of them hanging on the walls...

Originally Posted by Luckypenguin

This is a really great idea. I guess the hardest part is going through your catalogue and choosing the images you want, and then deciding in what sequence you want to display them. No small task, that.

I usually do the culling slowly over the course of the year - marking shots I particularly like. So when the end of the year comes, I go through those, kick some of them out, keep some of them. And then I do a cursory browse through the rest of the stuff I haven't thrown out to see if anything grabs me that didn't previously. This would be a much tougher task if I was being more selective and trying to get it down to a best 20 or 40 or something. But I seem to end up with about 120-150 that I like enough to want to see again - they're not all great stuff by a long shot, but each shot has SOMETHING in it that makes me want to see it again. Anyway, the selection process is an ongoing thing so it doesn't take a lot of time when it comes time to produce the book. And then once I open the Blurb software and start building it, it usually takes me a good solid 4-5 hours over the course of a day or two to place the ones you want (you always end up kicking a few more out during this process because you just can't find a place for them in any sort of context), sequence them, match facing pages to some extent. But I keep it pretty simple, don't go for fancy layouts or anything (I've seen some great layout work done in other's books, but I would suck at that and it would take exponentially longer to pull together) and I'm usually ready to send it off to print within a day or two of when I start actively pulling it together. Its one of those things that's hard to start, but it moves pretty quickly once you get started...

-Ray

Well, I finished marking my favorites. I still need to go through it a second time...there's a few instances of similar shots that need to be weeded out, and a few sentimental shots that aren't great that can be dropped. I'm at an overly generous 100 right now. Getting rid of similar shots could take me to 85....and leaving only the best would be closer to 40 or 50. Maybe I'll just print out a bunch and work on my technique for next year.

It's not great, but there's some stuff in here I'm pretty happy with. If you don't mind seeing too many pet photos, feel free to check it out here...... my personal favorites from 2012

Originally Posted by Luke

Well, I finished marking my favorites. I still need to go through it a second time...there's a few instances of similar shots that need to be weeded out, and a few sentimental shots that aren't great that can be dropped. I'm at an overly generous 100 right now. Getting rid of similar shots could take me to 85....and leaving only the best would be closer to 40 or 50. Maybe I'll just print out a bunch and work on my technique for next year.

It's not great, but there's some stuff in here I'm pretty happy with. If you don't mind seeing too many pet photos, feel free to check it out here...... my personal favorites from 2012

Sometimes I hate my ipad (usually not) - I had a whole response written out on this last night, the browser crashed before I'd hit "post" and all was lost. So, here goes again, but I'll probably never recapture the raw punk enthusiasm of that first take...

Luke, you should never apologize in advance (or any other time) for your photography - there's some WONDERFUL stuff in there. I don't know if you don't post that much here or if I'm just not looking at the right threads, but I only remember seeing a handful of those shots - most were new to me. I should make you a Flickr contact, of course, but the contacts I do have already make me feel like a dick because I get a huge email once a week with links to all of their new stuff and, because I'm a dick, it feels like a burden and too often I don't spend the time to go through it, and that makes me feel like MORE of a dick, and so I pretty much never add contacts no matter how brilliant because that just makes the perceived burden greater, the time spent on it less adequate, greater feelings of dick-ness, etc - its all just a horribly vicious circle. It would just be more people to feel bad about spending even less time on - there's no way out but to quit Flickr altogether, but then I'd feel REALLY bad... But I LOVE going through a "best of year" set like this. You've got a lot of GREAT stuff in there and a few that are so damn entertaining I never bother to "critique" the quality - I'm too busy laughing or smiling. Great pet shots too. And really creative processing. I loved the classic car coming through the garage door to my mind, the foggy Milwaukee morning, the various hilarious planking shots (dinners ready really cracked me up), etc.

So you should definitely make this into a book. I think you'd really enjoy going back and browsing through it in a year or a few when these shots are well out of your mind and just picking up a book for a quick look will be really enjoyable - I'm already finding that with my stuff from a couple of years ago... And you really ought to publish the captions you include on your Flickr pages - you give great narrative. I don't, so there's almost no text in my books, but yours just enhances the viewing experience - I had to back out of the slide show to see 'em.

Anyway, a damn fine set, well worthy of print - thanks for sending us that link. Post a link when you have the book together - I'd love a PDF of it.

-Ray

Originally Posted by Luke

Well, I finished marking my favorites. I still need to go through it a second time...there's a few instances of similar shots that need to be weeded out, and a few sentimental shots that aren't great that can be dropped. I'm at an overly generous 100 right now. Getting rid of similar shots could take me to 85....and leaving only the best would be closer to 40 or 50. Maybe I'll just print out a bunch and work on my technique for next year.

It's not great, but there's some stuff in here I'm pretty happy with. If you don't mind seeing too many pet photos, feel free to check it out here...... my personal favorites from 2012

Luke,

This is a fantastic set of photographs. I had seen most of them, but seeing them all together was a real treat. My wife really enjoyed it as well!

You certainly had a fantastic 2012 photographically speaking.

Cheers,

Antonio