Books: Photo Book Experiments

These lay-flat books, which have no center seams because it is built of glued spreads instead of stitched like a normal sewn binding, arrive in a beautiful, fancy, padded box, making this clearly a great gift or special event type of book. The hard cover images are great; they are lovely overall.
(The bright spot ear the top center is from sunlight coming through a gap in the blinds: it isn’t the book itself.)

Before I began my big project of rewriting my first novella into a proper novel, I laid out a monochrome photo book of horizontal images I’ve taken of recent architecture downtown.

Blurb is a local self-publishing, art-book-printing powerhouse that I’ve used for more than a dozen projects. I decided to try out their new, continuous-spread books with a subset of this body of work.

The book is printed beautifully – so beautifully, that I sent a copy to another photographer friend, to inspire him to use them as well! 🙂 (He will!). I’m really happy I laid this out and ordered it.

The flaws with the book are with my choice to make it so short: the samples I chose create a photo essay that doesn’t show off the range of architecture I intend to highlight.

I have the images to make it much more comprehensive, but need to re-shoot some reflections (I’m using a rangefinder, and I boggle it with reflections taken through wires of complex surfaces), and be very thoughtful in planning the layouts once I expand it. I’ll likely use Blurb’s regular premium book type (which is sewn/glued like ordinary books), to get a much longer book with a wider range of layouts than I chose this time.