Travel Photography Project

[Bletch]

I’ve been planning to make some sort of booklet/zine for quite some time. While I enjoyed putting together a photo book for the family many moons ago, I wanted to do something that felt more like me.

It was the middle of last year, I had been reading the TP Forum, I stumbled upon one of the zine-making threads, and it sparked my interest again. I had missed the deadline for the latest round, and the next one ended up being badly timed too, as I was going to be on holiday.

I knew from the off that my zine would probably have something to do with travel. It’s not like I had a shortage of photos to choose from, somewhere between 10k and 20k… maybe even 40k? I’ve never counted.
I did enjoy browsing through them, but it took ages, and I was a bit sad that I couldn’t remember taking some of the earlier ones. Old age does that. I’m just glad I can still travel and am happy to click away. I can almost see myself in the far future being shown my own photos while I’m laid in bed, being spoonfed by a disgruntled relative: “…and this is you in Oban..Oh, it's Delhi, I think. What’s with all the food pics, old man? Didn’t they have colour photos back in the 2010s?”

Taking a rest from the photos for a while, I began to look at the zine design. I knew from the start that I wanted A4 landscape. I wasn’t sure how many pages I would need, but I noted that if it ended up being quite long, I might need something other than saddle stitching - though I wasn’t too keen on that.

I designed a few templates in Photoshop showing various layouts. A favourite, on an open spread, was a full photo on the left-hand side (with or without margins), and on the right, four smaller images. However, I did want to mix things up a little, so I created five or six other templates for possible use, nothing was set in stone yet.

With summer ending, my thoughts also turned to a holiday. I wondered where I would go this year, lol.