Long-Term Photography Project: Creating a Book

10 years ago I started a long-term photography project. I mean, at the time, when I started, I didn't realize this would be a project, but it became one. This weekend, I can finally say, this project is 85% done. The hardest part is behind me.

I chose a few images from the project to intersperse in this post. Keep reading to learn why the images are in black and white. Also, click/tap the images for a larger view.

Let's back up about, 10 years.

It's 2016, my son is 9 years old and we sign him up for Cub Scouts. Seemed like a great idea at the time. Little did I know, this decision would change my life for the better in ways I never expected. Great relationships were formed among dads, we went on many camping adventures and got to witness these little boys grow up into teenagers who later became Boy Scouts. I miss the Cub Scout days.

You're here for the photography so let's get into that.

The camping trips, regular meetings and events were prime photography opportunities for me. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Again, it all comes down to access and I had access to the adventures of a bunch of young boys doing adventurous things. This provided me the opportunity to do what I love, documentary photography.

Over the course of 5 years, I shot something like 10 to 15 thousand photos of these kids. The images are almost exclusively candid. The boys were so accustomed to me pointing a camera at them, they didn't even see it anymore.

Now, these weren't all great photos by any means, but there are a lot of them I really like, not necessarily for aesthetic reasons but for sentimental reasons. After about the first year I realized I had inadvertently started a long-term project.

Once the boys moved on to Boy Scouts, this Cub Scout project ended. I told our 3 scout leaders I would be putting a photo book together and I was going to gift a copy to each of them as a thanks. Well, that never happened. It took me 5 years to finally approach this daunting project. Yes, 5 years.

Here's the thing about a photo project that stretches over years: It's really difficult to cull thousands of images and decide what to include and what to exclude. I took an initial stab at this back in 2021, narrowing it down to about 800 photos. Not exactly going to fit that into a book. I left the project in that state but always knew I needed to get back to it.

And so, this weekend my family was going out of town, I had some free time on my hands and thought it would be great to get out and shoot some photos with my newly obtained Canon 5D Mark II.

Then, it occurred to me, why do I need to shoot new images when I know damn well I have a hard drive full of photos waiting to be turned into something. The Cub Scout project is at the top of the list. Instead of going out and shooting more photos, I stayed home (it was super hot outside anyway) and culled and culled and culled until I narrowed my book-worthy photo set to 178. Still too many but I'm at the final stages of exclusion now.

Currently, the project is at the point where I need to start doing book layout so I can decide what images work and don't work together. Which ones need to be in a sequence, which ones are standalone, etc. That part doesn't stress me out and I'm looking forward to it.

Let's nerd out on some technical stuff.

So many cameras. Being a camera nerd, I used about 5 or 10 different cameras over the course of that 5 years. I started with a Sony RX10 (weird but interesting camera). There was a Fuji X100 (OG), a Fuji X100F, Sony a6000, Fuji X-T1, Fuji X-T2, Sony RX100 III, Fuji X-E2s, Fuji X-H1 and probably some others I'm forgetting. Anytime I got a new camera, scout meetings and trips were my primary testing ground.

Because there are so many cameras and different color profiles (yes, I shoot RAW) it was going to be a nightmare to create a consistent look for the book. I want a cohesive flow so I decided to go black and white. Also, some of the environments I was shooting in (indoors with overhead florescent lights) were just horrible for light and color. I like that choice now but wasn't sure at first.

Now, I know you may be reading this, looking at the images and thinking, these are okay photos but not great photos. Some are more or less great yes, but this project isn't meant to appeal to a general audience. I guess this book could stand on its own, but that's not the intention. This book is intended to mean something to the ones who participated in these events.

Conclusion

A long-term photography project is essential to becoming a better photographer. That's not just my opinion. It's a fact. I can see the progression of my skills over the years as I shot these. The early images sucked more than the later ones. That's growth. I have other projects in my catalog where I can see that same pattern.

Maybe you have a set of images on a hard drive and you've thought of turning those photos into something. Instead of going out and shooting more photos, consider grabbing a cup of coffee and organizing those images into a set. It's not easy, but it's a worthy thing to do.

I'll create a blog post to share the book creation process once I figure that out. I'm thinking of using Blurb. We'll see how that goes.