Long before Paul Simon sang its praises, I shot Kodachrome on a Minolta SRT-101. I shared my photos by giving slide shows to family and friends. Since they were family and friends, of course, they had to watch. I abandoned that wonderful film when I joined the digital world in 2004. I also abandoned slide shows.
Without slide shows, I shared my photos by posting some of them on my first website. Relatives could then see them, or not, even if they lived thousands of miles away.
When I started to exhibit photographs in some small local venues like restaurants and coffee shops, I realized that I was putting a lot of effort into a project that would be up only for one or two months. So, I decided to make a book for each of my exhibits. Each book would serve as a record of a specific exhibit, and, in this no-slide-show era, would provide an easy way to show family and friends a miniature version of the exhibit. Using free software from Blurb.com, I now have ten books covering exhibits from 2010 to 2018. You can find links to each one of these books on my Book Page.
Making photo books can help you see pictures differently. You start to see groupings of images instead of individual pictures. A photo that you would never print for an exhibit might be perfect for helping to tell your story. Soon the subject matter of my books began to expand. Below is a summary of some books that are not associated with exhibits.
One year when I was trying to think of what to give my wife for Christmas, I decided to go back through my old slide collection and create a book with photos from the first six years of our children’s lives. After digging through and squinting at thousands of 24mm x 36mm transparencies, I finally reduced the pile of possibilities down to 108 pictures. I scanned the slides to digitize them, organized the photos on draft pages, wrote an introduction and a poem to put the images into context, added some clip-art, and came up with Days of Smiles and Laughter (2011). It took considerably longer than I thought it would, but the final product was better than I had expected. My wife loved it! I also gave copies to our two sons. If you click on the cover image below, you can see the entire book on Blurb.com. Enlarge the copy for a better view. No purchase necessary!
One summer I asked my sister to show me how to make her delicious dill pickles. I snapped a few photos of her while she was showing me how to make them. When I made my first batch I took a few more photos. Then I thought it would be nice to make a book for my sister that documented her vegetable garden and her recipe for dill pickles. I added a few humorous photos of myself making pickles and created Auntie Min’s Pickles (2013), which became a Christmas gift.
My sister-in-law and her husband have a cottage on Planting Ground Lake in Three Lakes, Wisconsin. When they purchased this cottage it was a funky old place where you could imagine spending a nice summer vacation. Unfortunately, a fire destroyed several of the cottages in the area, including theirs, and they were left with the difficult burden of rebuilding. They have been very kind to many of their family members and often invite us up to relax, go for a boat ride, enjoy great meals from the grill, and maybe have a drink or three. One Christmas I gave them several framed photographs to decorate their walls. Then I thought it might be nice to capture some images over the course of a year or two that showed the changing seasons at Three Lakes. The next Christmas they received 3 Lakes, 4 Seasons (2014).
Our older son Eric traveled to Germany with a group of high school students in 1982. He stayed with the family of Gerhard and Ursula Müller for a month, visited school with their son Andi, and toured the area with his classmates. Andi also stayed with us for a month and visited Eric’s school. My wife pointed out that 2017 was the 25th anniversary of that trip and suggested that we take Eric back to Germany to visit the Müller family. So, we did. The Müller family was as happy to see us as we were to see them. As expected, I took many photographs of the event, so it was no surprise that I created a book to commemorate it. For Christmas we sent them Then and Now (2017).
I have no other books in the works right now, but I suspect it won’t be long before another project comes to mind and I’ll be seeing what I can assemble to share with family and friends.
* * * * *
One final note: In recent years, film photography has been making a comeback. Some feel the look is much richer than can be obtained from digital photography. I still have my Beseler 23C enlarger, El Nikkor lens, and all the miscellaneous gear for developing and printing film. I’m very glad to have had that experience but doubt that I will ever return to using traditional film.