If you receive my monthly email newsletter (sign up here!), you’ve been in the know for months: I’m working on my next book of photographs.
The working title is Square Photographs, and it will compile the best photos I’ve made with my Yashica TLRs, the Yashica-D and the Yashica-12.
I learned an important lesson after publishing my last photo book, Vinyl Village: image quality matters. I published that book through Amazon using their least-expensive paper and ink options to keep costs down. I was testing a hypothesis that a low price would lead to more sales. It worked: Vinyl Village is my best-selling book.
But several of you expressed sharp disappointment with its print quality. That criticism is fair. When you compare the original scans as found in my Flickr album to those printed in the book, you can see that the printed images are thin and lack contrast.
For Square Photographs, I will choose Amazon’s best paper and full-color printing. I believe this will dramatically improve image quality, although it will raise the book’s price somewhat.
For those of you who want top-flight image quality, I’m also going to offer a Deluxe Edition of the book through Blurb. I printed my first two photo books, Exceptional Ordinary and Textures of Ireland, through Blurb, and they are gorgeous. But brace for impact, as the Deluxe Edition at Blurb is likely to be considerably more expensive than the Standard Edition at Amazon.
At the moment there are 39 photographs in this collection, although I may remove a small number of them as I finish editing the book. Each photograph will be accompanied by a short story, reflection, or essay, just as I write in my long-running Single Frame series here on this blog.
You can read those vignettes right now, if you like! I’ve written them all right on each photo’s page on Flickr, and then collected the photos into an album. Click the photo at the top of this post to get started, and then click the > button on each photo to move to the next one.
It’s my thought that after you see all of the photographs and read my words, it’ll make you want the book even more. There’s just something to holding a printed photograph in your hands that beats seeing pixels on a screen.
My next tasks are to lay out the book and create the cover, so I can send the files to be published. I’ve been busier with my regular life than I thought I’d be, but with any luck I’ll be able to finish this work this month and share with you where you can pick up your copy of Square Photographs.
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