The Book

A screenshot of a proposed page. 

In October of 2011 I was contacted by my old Social Studies teacher to help him compile an anthology of work to send off to Joseph Boyden in response to a project he did that related to his book, Three Day Road. I was too busy to give it serious thought while I was at university, but with the summer well underway, I knew it was time to put the hammer down.

Like most people, I had little prior experience when it came to compiling an anthology. Not only that, I would have to learn about layouts, fonts, publishing, and the nitty gritty parts of the printing process in a very short period of time. I guess I’m not just a generalist in the photo area.

When I was given this task, Adobe had not announced Lightroom 4 yet, so I had no idea that a Book Module would be included. I thought that I would have to learn InDesign in a few weeks and do it that way. Thankfully, I could use Lightroom now and learn InDesign later. It would be a mostly photo-based coffee table book format anyway, which worked well within the software’s limitations. It is very difficult to do even the simplest things, as you sometimes need to work around the tools rather than with the tools. It is the price for initial simplicity. Locking users into pre-made templates can be a pain as well. 

Of course, the project is still in progress, so I can’t say too much about it. It’s been keeping me busy for a few weeks now, and especially over the past week. Like many of the projects that originate from that particular teacher, it is occasionally frustrating and always time consuming. However, I think I will learn a lot from this experience. If it’s good enough to put an ISBN number on it, it would be an interesting addition to my resume.

Rest assured, there will be another post about it when I’m done.