Monday, July 29, 2013

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books

Yesterday I went to Vaakkoi with my daughter to pick blueberries. There is a very good place 25 minutes walk away from the parking place, and it seems that nobody goes that far away to pick blueberries. They were very sweet even though not specially big ones.

Also, yesterday I managed to get started with making a photo book of our trip to Lapland, without significant problems. The photographs above were taken during the trip.

I bought a new version of Pages from App Store, version 4.3, while I had 3.0, which has a bug where the deleted pages didn't disappear properly. That bug has been fixed in version 4.3, so the upgrade was well worth the price.

Pages works the same way as before so there was no learning curve. Well, except for the fact that saving files works now differently, and at first I modified an existing photo book when I should have duplicated it first and then started working on the file. Old habits die hard...

I imported the 439 photographs into a new library in Aperture, and working from there, divided the photographs into rough chapters, moving them when needed, and deleting those I didn't feel would make the cut. In the end I had 216 photographs left, divided into nine chapters plus front and back cover photographs.

After the organization work done in Aperture, I started making the rough typesetting in Pages, modifying the text styles and colors to fit what I'm aiming at. Next, I started selecting the cover photographs, chapter title photographs, and those photographs which could make the story in each chapter.

At this point I realized that there are certain types of photographs missing, such ones which help the story to go forward, and as originally I didn't plan on making a book out of the photographs from the trip, I didn't takes such photographs except by accident.

Currently the photo book has 80 pages of photographs in Pages. It is too much, I should cut it down to 64 or so, but I'm letting it rest for a while. But it is almost where I want it to be. A lot remains to be done still: writing text and captions, and fine-tuning the layout. Also some photographs need additional post-processing to work better in a printed book.

I noticed that Blurb has new options for making photo books, such as "pro" papers etc., which might be something to test out. Last time, in 2011, I used "lustre premium" paper, which was all right, but maybe this time I try "proline uncoated" paper, which looks interesting.

(Posting title is from the poem The Tables Turned by William Wordsworth.)

No comments: