TURNING A DECADE WORTH OF PHOTOS INTO A BOOK – PART I

With Corona turning 2020 into the year of cancellations, I found it to be a good time to look back at my photo work. I already edit some old photos from travels, but now I also took the time to go through 13 years worth of aviation photos and a decade worth of air to air images.

Looking at this body of work I started thinking about actually doing something with all these photos that now just fill my harddrives and Instagram feed. The obvious thing to do is to make a book of some sorts. I experimented with this in the past when I just started out with photography, but I never made anything that covers such a large body of work.

The obvious next question is what this should look like. Since 2020 will be a hiatus, but 2021 will hopefully bring many flights again, I thought a zine was the most appropriate way to go. It’s the ideal way to showcase a series that is still in progress. But on the other hand it is more than a decade worth of photos, so even though the series is not finished, it still forms a whole. Photobooks didn’t feel right either because I always see a photobook as a finished product; as something that is made by publishers and not self published. To me a books is the end of a series and a start of a new part of what you do as a photographer.

In the end I decided to go with the book anyway, but to go for a small size. Something modest and easy going. Maybe it is some kind of an ending of a series. Maybe from next year on I’ll take a new approach to photographing the aviation world.

Next on is the actual execution. I started this whole project by going through all albums. It took me a couple of afternoons, but I looked at every single aviation photo I ever took. I selected some previously edited photos, but mostly copy pasted the original files into a new folder. Next up I fired up Lightroom and started editing. Something that took me another couple of afternoons. I had the same experience editing these as I had with the travel photos that I wrote about in the previous post. So many great shots I missed before and so many pictures that just weren’t good enough in the end.

I still ended up with about 200 photos, which is of course too much for a book that I just described as ‘modest’. So the next thing on the list is narrowing the selection. And that’s where I’m at now in this process. I narrowed it down to about 100 now. I’m probably going to narrow it further to about 70-80 before I make small prints and start sequencing. It’s the aim to narrow it even further while doing this. I don’t really want there to be more than 50 pictures in there, but each and everyone of them should capture that amazement I feel every time I go up to take photos.

More to come soon.

Thoughts, comments, questions? Let me know in the comment section below.

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