Tuesday, June 29, 2010

SoFoBoMo 2010 - two books ready and finished!


Bench, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

During the long Midsummer weekend, I did a SoFoBoMo mini-project titled Impressions of Midsummer's Eve, of which I posted a separate note. This photo book is also available in PDF form.

In addition, I have finished my "real" SoFoBoMo project. And what is SoFoBoMo? SoFoBoMo is a group event where photographers all around the world make solo photo books in PDF form, in 31 days, start to finish, and there has to be at least 35 photographs in the book.

Making photo books was greatly helped by the experience from last year, when I put together some instructions for later use.

My other SoFoBoMo project is titled Filling the square: play and dream. All photographs are square format (1:1 aspect ratio), taken between June 5th and 22nd. In all there are 68 pages in the book.

Here is a quote from the introduction: "Picturing the world in a square. Mostly landscape and nature photography, with man-made things thrown in. I have divided the photo book into seven chapters, each of which consists of a few images which together build a bigger picture."

I used the hint from last year to output a 172 megabyte PDF file from Pages, and distilled it into a 6.2 MB final version which is available at the SoFoBoMo site.

It took only a couple of minutes to make a Blurb version of the book, outputting the pages at 300 dpi resolution jpeg files and using a full-bleed layout. I used last year SoFoBoMo photobook as the starting point, otherwise this would have been much harder. Originally I didn't even remember what software you need to use with Blurb, and I needed to download a new version of BookSmart to get it to work.

I ordered one copy from Blurb, to see how it turns out. This time I used thicker paper than last year, to make a better visual impact.

4 comments:

Markus Spring said...

Congratulations to this fine book, Juha.

I just finished my first read of it and am deeply impressed. Different from your "Impressions of a Midsummers Eve" - which have an unrivaled airiness and directness in comparison to "Filling the Square" - the well selected images get at least for me an additional, intensifying aspect through the introductory texts. The grouping of images in a very wide interpretation of the chapter title is a fine way to direct the viewer and increase the surprise.

Congrats again - this is a very fine piece of work!

Juha Haataja said...

Thanks!

I got a printed version of this book from Blurb, the result was quite good, accurate colors and all. It seems that using "premium" paper was worth the small extra.

I wonder which will survive longer, the printed version or the digital one.

Andreas said...

Oh dear, to think that I may have not even one book this year :)

I absolutely loved this book, and the images from the car thrilled me. I've tried some of these myself, recently and earlier, but yours are real good.

Juha Haataja said...

@Andreas: Thanks! I have been following your reports of progress, and it would be a pity not to have a book.