Magazines

While I’ve continued making family albums through Blurb, I’ve also taken the plunge and started to finally put some of my photos together into projects. Or, well, mini-projects. I’m nowhere near ready to put a book together—heck, I’m not even sure it has to be a book—but I’ve got a lot of smaller sets of photos that I’ve wanted to see as some sort of printed collection.

Blurb’s magazine format is in many ways the perfect way to do this. It’s much less of a financial commitment than their photobooks but the printing and paper is also a lot nicer than their trade books. The magazine format also encourages small projects of 32–48 pages or so—making it very easy to just put something together relatively quickly.

So instead of working on and biting the bullet for purchasing an expensive one-off book, I can make a bunch of magazines for a fraction of the price and experiment a lot more.

I even set everything up for sale on Blurb’s site since Blurb’s book preview interface is pretty slick and makes for a nice way to look at the projects. I’m not promoting these anywhere* but I do enjoy flipping through them online. I’m not sure I can recommend buying them anyway since Blurb’s shipping prices are designed with books in mind and so feel a bit exorbitant if you’re purchasing a batch of small magazines instead of a stack of heavy books.

*This is the first time I’ve even linked to them.

Most of the magazines are a new iteration of the photos which are in my portfolio at vossbrink.net. So ~90% the same edit but some photos have been moved around or deleted. One magazine per section on my site, plus the B-Sides.* I’m still intending to eventually put everything together as a book but I’ll sit with the magazines for a while and see how I feel about them.

*The B-Sides concept is one I’m going to keep in mind for any future book projects too.

These were pretty quick to make since most of the editing was already done. Since I didn’t want to spend a lot of time doing the typesetting and text/cover design, I kept things super simple and did everything in my default text settings rather than mess around with fonts and design something specific for each project. I actually like the family-like sameness of the end result but I think I’ll have to consider a different approach with the entire project.

I also threw together a few small projects that have been marinating on this blog. One of them is of the Tripod Holes series of posts I’ve been making. It’s actually much much different to see it in print rather than on the blog. I’m looking forward to doing a second Tripod Holes magazine with new blog posts as well as putting together a full-size book at some point.

The other project I worked on was of my Pow Wow photos. One of the sad things about being on the East Coast is admitting that I will probably not make it to another Stanford Pow Wow for a long time. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the photos I took there but for the time being I have a small magazine of them which will make me homesick every Mothers Day.

Shipping issues aside, I’m super pleased with the way everything turned out and am thinking about what other small projects I’ll want to make while I sit with these.