As mentioned in a previous post I love seeing my images in a printed form, either as prints or books. I usually just do my books for myself and maybe a few close friends, but people often have asked me to do a book of my images that they can purchase, and I’ve finally got around to doing one.
I had hoped to finish the images for the book over Christmas, but found that selecting and editing the images took much much longer than I expected. Then I had the opportunity of displaying a copy of my book on the Aperture Books stand at The Photography Show at the end of March, which gave me a hard deadline to complete the book. I went for an A3 book from Aperture, as I’d previously had a similar book from them which I was very pleased with.
The deadline ensured that I finished the book, and it was great seeing it on display at the show. I had two copies printed, one for me, and one for the wonderful Lulu Lockhart, the subject of the images in the book.
While the book from Aperture is great, as it’s A3 it’s not exactly inexpensive, so I decided to do a book with the identical images in a more accessible format using Blurb, who I have used on a number of occasions and been very pleased with their books. It’s a good-sized book at 33cmx28cm (13″x11″) with 141 images over 106 pages, and you can see a full preview of the images as well as purchase it.
As anybody who uses Blurb knows they often do offers, so when I was mailed a discount code I mentioned it on social media, and I was pleasantly surprised how many of my friends contacted me to purchase copies. If anybody else I know is interested in purchasing a copy then please contact me, and when Blurb have the next of their regular offers I can let you know.
The book is all images, with just a single page of text. There’s two reasons for that, one is that I really didn’t know what to write that would contribute to the images, plus I thought that having no text would ensure no interruption to the flow of looking at the images.
The word Muse is often misused, but looking at the dictionary definition I thought it fitted perfectly. Lulu does inspire me to produce images, but far more than that she is extremely pro-active in all aspects of the image-making process, making our shoots both immensely enjoyable and extremely productive, I hope that comes across in the introduction to the book.
Here’s a few of the images from the book that I haven’t published on the blog before:
As well as having my book on display at The Photography Show I was also pleased to see one of my images of the lovely Ivory Flame prominently displayed on the Canson stand, as Canson is one of the main papers I use.
Many thanks to Lulu for creating all the images with me, she really is an inspiration and so wonderful to work with. Thanks also Aperture and Blurb for producing such great books, and my friends who are now enjoying their copies of the book. If you’re interested in a copy of the book when it’s next on offer then please contact me.
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