PHOTO BOOK: PHOTO ADVENTURES VOLUME II

Yay! I made another photo book! I made a short to-do list of 11 items this fall, and this was one of them (which leaves me with 5 items left on this list, eek!). Photo Adventures Volume II, is as you may have guessed, the sequel to this photo book (and you can see others I've made here and here), and contains photos Graeme and I have taken with our analog cameras. One thing I love about these books is how they're divided up. The first volume contains photos from all our photo adventures up until Graeme proposed. In fact, the last photo of that book is a photo I took of him with my Diana mini, seconds before he popped the question—I love that photo! This second volume contains the photos we've taken while we were engaged, most of which time we were living in separate countries, so there's a lot of photos both from Scotland and Norway. I've already started on Volume III, which starts with an iPhone photo (I'm including digitals in this one!) of my super excited face as Graeme surprised me by showing up on my doorstep a week earlier than he was supposed to when he moved to Norway this summer.

Making a photo book is a really time-consuming task for me though, so I'm way behind on the list of photo books I want to make. First I gather all the photos (which usually requires a bit of digging as they're all in different folders organized by camera, then year, then occasion--that's how it goes when you have about 15 cameras and organizing geek tendencies). Then I spend ages deciding which ones to include, before deciding on the order and then eventually the layout and placement on each page. And I have tons of little rules I follow, like how the colors of a page have to go together, and how I can't have two pictures of the same person next to each other, unless there's other people in that shot or unless it for some reason just works really well. I've also started editing some of the photos in photoshop first, though so far only to add titles as I'm not a massive fan of the title page options and fonts the blurb software comes with. It's a very time-consuming process, but I also really enjoy it, and these days I'm making more of an effort to dedicate some time to actually sit down and do it. However, my dad recently asked me if I could make one for him using his pictures, as he'd gotten a flyer in the post for a special offer on Cewe photo books and because I help him with all things computer-related. I laughed in his face.