machquette

Making a maquette book


In my minor project where I photographed Durham Miners Gala, as the end result in the way I chose to present my work I chose to create a maquette book. This was a A5 size paper back book which I hand made through saddle stitching the pages together and printing the pages myself. I made this book as a mock up version ready for when can progress onto making my own professionally printed book. 

As I began to discuss in a previous post in which I looked at a book which was produced by the documentary photographer 'Mark Power', my aim for my final project will be similar to my minor, In that I will produce a visual book as one outcome. 

Once I had converted my images into black and white, I was very undecided on whether I should use my original coloured images, or use the converted black and white images.

As I also had to concentrate on narrowing down my images and choosing a selection to create a book. I chose to create a mock up book of a coloured version and a black and white version. 

I chose to work with A5 sized portrait style books to begin with. During a tutorial with my tutor I was shown a small maquette around this size in black and white. The way the images had been laid out was two images side by side on a double page. I really liked this layout and thought it worked well. The images used in this maquette were also shot in landscape like my own images so I decided to attempt this layout myself, however I experimented slightly with the layout as I placed some images in different positions on the page and some sanding alone. The inspiration to create this layout was from a Paul Graham book. 

Own work

I then made a colour version of the book so I could compare the two. I made the colour book the exact same shape and size, as well as sticking to a very similar order with the images. I found when using colour some images worked better than they had in black and white therefore meaning I found I had more images I needed to include in my colour maquette. 

After making both maquettes one thing I had gained was a better idea of the order I actually wanted the images to be placed in. I still didn't feel completely sure on the layout of the images on each page or whether I wanted to use black and white images. However getting a final idea on the order of the images was something which was really important as I didn't want the images placed in an order where they there was no thought put into it. I wanted to make sure the images, if anything, where in chronological order to a certain extent so that they would make sense in telling a story to someone who may know nothing about this day. 

To help me decide on whether to use black and white or colour images before moving forward to making more mock up versions of my book I presented the two books to my peers in a group critique in order to gain some feed back. The feedback I gained that almost everyone preferred my images in colour. 

This feedback led me think about my what my aims were with the work originally. My original intentions were to capture not only the event its self but the community of Sedgefield on this day and the parts of the day such as the celebration and drinking which is a side no photographers ever seem to capture. This therefore along side my feedback from my peers helped me to decide on using colour. Photographing the happy spirits and community wouldn't be as affective in black and white. The positive response from my peers over my coloured images also re-stored my confidence in my original images.