Last summer I walked 1,100km through France and Spain.
Over the past few months I've made a small book of the photographs I made while away. Who knew that the walking would be the easy part!
I spend several morning, afternoons, and evenings in college staring at different line-ups of similar sequences, trying to understand how exactly it is you make a book. Deciding on one image can take all day, and a week later that same picture is in the trash pile and there's a completely different and possibly better flow to the piece.
I learnt that time away from your own work is very necessary. Some images that you love realistically are not the best for the piece. There is still one (and a half) photographs that I wish had made it into the book.
For the printing of the main book I worked with Ex Why Zed, a zine printers based in the UK. The information about InDesign and types of paper, folding, bleeds, etc. on their website is fantastic. It gave me the power to work through everything myself. Who knew an image changed so drastically when you convert it to CMYK?
The wrapping around my book contains all the stamps I collected as part of the Camino pilgrimage. Finding a place that could print affordably onto tracing paper took some time but eventually I had a light-bulb moment - a blueprinting lab.
The blue band holding the book and tracing paper wrap together is card I had cut and glued, with embossing from the thesis printing centre down the road.
If you feel like buying one, go over here!
Here's a flick-though of the first few pages:
