My friend Kathy Richardson has produced some awesome photo books from trips we have done together. Here are some of the tips that Kathy has agreed to share with us.
1. Take lots and lots of photos – of the “main events”, of course, but also of the setting, the food, the guides, the people you’re travelling with, etc., etc. If photography is your passion, as it is mine, then just record everything you see along the way as well as you can. Once you’re back home and reliving the trip in your memory and through your images, you’ll be glad you did.
2. Look to other books for inspiration on design ideas – page layouts, fonts, colours used, etc. And be prepared to “tweak” the standard layout that comes with your book publishing program to get exactly the look you want.
3. Be selective in the images you include in the book. Choose your favourites and don’t sacrifice quality for quantity. No one wants to look at mediocre photos or a dozen photos that are pretty much all the same.
4. Bigger photos make a bigger impact than smaller ones. For maximum impact, try to include lots of pages with just 1 image on them. Double page spreads are also very effective for some shots.
5. Don’t be afraid to have some blank space on the page. A nice wide border around an image can make it “pop”.
6. Work out a number of layout options for the book and then use them consistently throughout – e.g., full page spread, 1 image with consistent border, 4 horizontal images, 2 horizontal + 2 vertical images, etc.
7. Consider whether any “special effects” would work in your book. In my “Best of Botswana” book, I used a sepia toned filter on a background image, on the cover page as well as on the introduction to each chapter and again on the final page. And, on a couple of pages, I inset smaller “vignettes” on a related background image.
8. Don’t rush the creative effort. It takes time to produce a quality product. Once you’ve produced a first “draft”, step back and take a hard look at it to see how/if it could be improved.
9. I use the book layout program that comes with aperture. I think the quality of the finished product is excellent (accurate color rendition, first class paper stock) and delivery in under a week from the time the order goes in never ceases to amaze me. But now that Lightroom 4 interfaces with blurb publishing, I may give that route a try with the next one.
10. I always opt for the extra-large format (at 13″ x 10″ it makes an impressive statement) in hardcover and generally fill the maximum 100 pages. I always experiment with themes but seem to come back to Modern Lines as a starting point. I then custom design many of the page layouts and save them so I can repeat them elsewhere in the book. (It’s possible to size and position both photo and text boxes wherever you want them on the page, for a truly custom look.) I recently made a family photo “album” containing a lot of historic photos going back almost 100 years. For that one, I used the “Snapshots” theme, because it suited the mood I was trying to create in the book.