Blurb have a 35% discount on offer until the end of this month so I've been hurrying to get together enough scans on one subject to make a bit of a book so I can see how they turn out in that format. I decided to concentrate on my Preston pictures and found one or two oddities I have no memory at all of taking. I don't even have a clue where this one was shot.
I wanted to make sure that both orientations were displayed at the same size, in a landscape format book the landscape pictures usually print larger. That meant making a template to output the pictures they way I wanted them. As it turned out this is a much quicker way of formatting the book pages than messing about with the page templates. Another lesson learned.
Depending on how the book turns out I'll either make a series of books from the Dusty Negative Archive, or one big one with sections devoted to the various subjects. That will also depend on how many pictures I end up scanning. No rush now I have the sample on its way.
Further to my belief that putting a black border round a monochrome picture I have been playing around with the split toning controls in Lightroom. I haven't a clue what I'm doing with them, but they have a similar effect on photographs. Making them look like 'proper' pictures. Add toning
and a border and the result is that a casual snapshot suddenly looks like art!
If you take the photo using a wide aperture and crop to 5x4 it can make a digital picture look almost like it was shot on large format film. I could imagine making a set of pictures of sheep like this. But I won't!
One thing all this scanning and toning nonsense has driven home is that digital is much more flexible than film. And that's not mentioning how much technically better my photographs are these days. There's certainly been no improvement in my level of competence over the last 40 years. So it must be the gear and the technology that's got better!
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