My partner Kat and I recently moved into our first non-student home together, in Nottingham.  I’m from Derby, which is a half hour drive away, and Kat is from Wellingborough, which is around an hour on the train.  Nottingham was an obvious choice for a couple of reasons: it’s the city in which we studied together, it’s a great city in its own right, and it’s also where the highest concentration of our friends live.

There are essentially two ways to surround yourselves with photographs in a new home: prints, and albums.  I love both, but they function very differently.

Photographs are important, and I like them to be printed large so that they become a dominating feature of the space.  The problem is that printing and framing large photographs can be prohibitively expensive, so care must be taken in deciding which photographs (out of literally thousands) to commit to printing.  In contrast, the main problem with photobooks is having enough images available to commit to the expense of printing and binding, without the images becoming incohesive.

Deciding on how to display photographs in our new home got me thinking about the benefits of presenting images in book format.  My favourite photobook is American Power by Mitch Epstein, which Kat – in a small, isolated example of what an amazing girlfriend she is – bought me for Valentines day last year.  American Power is 144 pages long, and requires a decent (but well-rewarded) investment in time to properly enjoy.  It is beautifully printed on thick paper stock, hardbound, and lovely.  It is expensive to print books like this, especially as a consumer and as a one-off.

It no longer has to be this way, however.  I use Adobe Lightroom to catalog and process my photographs, and version 4 of Lightroom introduced the ability to produce elegant photobooks for publishing either through Blurb’s printing service, or – significantly – as a PDF or series of JPEG files.  I decided to try this out by creating a short photobook based on yesterday’s trip to Attenborough Nature Reserve with Kat.  Think of this as a self-contained section in a family photo album.  The same principals should transfer nicely to short photographic projects.

Unfortunately the PDFs exported from Lightroom split each double page spread into separate pages.  To get around this, I exported the book as separate JPEG files, and then recreated the book in InDesign CS3.  The book I created, which is presented as double 10×8″ spreads, is embedded below.  However, I recommend you download a copy in PDF format, for better quality.

Producing books in this way is quick and costs nothing, which means publishing photographic projects in book format no longer necessitates said projects being as epic a commitment as American Power.  Expect more eBook mini-projects in the near future.

I have a Moleskine notebook that I use for uni and the odd other occasions that I need to take notes.

I love my Moleskine. The pages are the perfect size and shape for how I use a notebook, and the pages are light, yet thick enough to stop ink bleeding through to the other side, and sufficiently textured to feel pleasing to write on.

The major drawback to a Moleskine is that it’s a physical, analogue medium, in a world in which I’m used to the conveniences of digital tools. The photos I take on my iPhone (which, I am only slightly surprised to admit, has become my most frequently-used camera) automatically appear on my MacBook Pro and iPad. Anything I need to remember or retain a record of goes straight into Evernote, which is not only synced between all my devices, but which are also run through Evernote’s free OCR service, meaning that even text within photographs I’ve taken is searchable. I’ll leave the triumph that is my (well, Peter Krogh’s) photograph-cataloging system for another post.

Last week I stumbled across Paper, which is an ostensibly free iPad app for notes and journaling. On the face of it, this should make it an excellent replacement for my Moleskines. However, it has a couple of drawbacks.

Firstly, the only tool available by default is a generic pen. There are a total of 5 tools available which, apart from the pen, cost either £1.49 each, or £5.49 for the lot. The free pen isn’t a terrible choice – I’d much rather have it than, say, watercolours – but it is incredibly hard to use without a stylus, which is the second major drawback. My writing isn’t massive and, to be honest, isn’t that terrible, but I find it hard to enter text by hand into this app.

‘Arty’ as it looks, it isn’t particularly functional for writing, which is what initially drew me to Paper. What it turns out to be very good for indeed, however, is quick sketches. For instance, even for someone who can’t draw, the following drawing only took me about two minutes, and zero effort:

Each drawing is saved automatically as a page, meaning that finding drawing and notes that you’ve made is a case of flipping through pages rather than scrolling through filenames. I’ve also found that it’s useful for drawing lighting diagrams:

I’ve also been using Paper to scribble diagrams of ideas for layouts for an upcoming group exhibition. It’s quite satisfying to use for this kind of note-taking because the book-like organisation system means that you’ve always got a record of notes that you’ve taken without having to manually save.

So, in conclusion, it’s a great app for scribbles and drawings. Not something that could replace a physical notebook, but an excellent compliment.

The App of the Week on the iOS App Store this week is Cinemagram, a tool for animating portions of otherwise static photographs.

The app works by capturing a couple of seconds of video and then allowing you to mask over the details that you’d like animated.  It’s surprisingly satisfying.

Cinemagraphs aren’t new (there are some nice examples on Jamie Beck’s tumblr photoblog), but I wasn’t aware of such a simple way of making them before now.

It’s a pretty straightforward process, with a couple of catches.  Firstly, everything needs to be pretty still, and the details that move should move in place rather than moving around the frame.  The second thing to be aware of is that in order to create a seamless animation, the movement is played forwards and then backwards on a loop.  This is quite evident on the example (of Kat in KFC earlier) above – notice how she sometimes blinks ‘backwards’.

At time of writing, it is free in the UK iOS App Store.

I recently came across the excellent Pianosequenza series by Mario Zanaria.  In this series, Zanaria uses a whole 36-exposure rolls of black and white 35mm film to create contact sheets, which become the final output.  There are a mixture of square-ish ones in rows of 6×6 frames (as above), and others that are laid out as 5×7 frame portraits (such as this excellent piece).  Be aware, though, that some contain nudity and therefore may be NSFW.

They’re absolutely fantastic, as is the rest of his work.  We’re all familiar with the maxim ‘there is nothing new in photography’, but having said that, I don’t recall any well-known examples of contact sheets being used in this way.  The nearest thing that I can think of is the Facebook profile banner manipulations that were fashionable for a while, before Facebook Timeline came out.  To compare Zanaria’s work to Facebook hacks would be insulting, though – to end up with results this perfect, with 36 perfect frames, on an analogue medium, is very impressive and visually arresting.

Zanaria also sells a set of photobooks on Blurb.

Via PetaPixel.