PHOTO ADVENTURES BOOK

I have spent the past coulpe of days painting furniture. A table with six chairs, to be exact, that I bought from a local priest who was moving home. I will no doubt be doing a post on that once it's finished and actually in the kitchen, but currently I'm a little fed up with all the sanding and all the coats and all the pernickety details on the chairs, so I'm taking a break and decided to write about this awesome photo book I started last year and finally managed to get finished.

Graeme and I have a rather large collection of toy cameras. We love going on photo adventures, where we take the dog, grab a couple of analog cameras and just go somewhere and explore. Since we've been doing it for years, we've got quite the collection of photographs that have just been sitting on our harddrive for the longest time. Sound familiar?

Obviously something had to be done, so I decided to make a photo book with photos from all of the photo adventures Graeme and I have gone on as a couple before we got engaged, photos from 2008 to 2012. I've always enjoyed looking through old photo albums, and I suppose photo books are pretty much the photo albums of today. So I browsed a couple companies online that make them and eventually settled for a company called Blurb and started making one. 

The free software was easy to use and gave a lot of freedom in terms of layouts and design, as you could make your own layout templates as well as use the ones provided. I chose the option of a nice hardback square 18 cm by 18 cm book with a black book cloth, and charcoal endsheets. It also came with a dust jacket, but I'm not really a fan of dust jackets so I didn't keep it. I think the only thing I feel could have been better is if they had the option to print the title on the hardback cover (potentially in stead of the dust jacket).

I absolutely love the result though, and will definitely be making tons more of these! I've already started my next one with all the photos from our roadtrip holiday to California in 2011, and I plan on making one for our trip around Spain last summer, as well as a photo adventures volume two.

The book finishes with the two pictures below, which have a bit of a funny story to them. I mentioned that the photo book consists of photos from all the photo adventures Graeme and I have gone on as a couple before we got engaged, and these two photos were the last photos taken just before he proposed. The photo to the left is the view we were admiring as we sitting on a cliff in Hausvik in southern Norway, right before Graeme popped the question. And the photo to the right was actually taken seconds before. In fact, he is actually sitting there holding the ring in his hand as I'm taking the photo. I had no idea when I took it of course, which makes me enjoy the photo all the more.

And this is the main reason it took me so long to finish the book, because I wanted it as the final photo and it took so long to get it developed. I was so nervous that it wouldn't turn out, as the Diana Mini I took it with has a tendency to be a bit temperamental with me. Months ago, I developed a bunch of films and totally panicked when I realised that this particular roll of film wasn't in it. I thought I had lost it until I realised it was just still in the camera (phew!). And then when I finally finished the film I had a whole lot of trouble when I went to get it developed and printed and was left with only the negatives to tease me (I ranted lots about it here), so it wasn't until this April when I finally got them printed.

But alas, here it is! And it was totally worth the wait!