Luka's photo book

catalog

Well-known member
New thread to tie a few things together as there's been discussion here and there and it's now definitely happening.

We could do with people chipping in with offers of help.

I'll post some key questions in subsequent posts.

Some background

Relevant 'parent' thread: photos of lea valley before Olympic development

Everyone who doesn't already know (eg @constant escape @Linebaugh @dilbert1 etc) should have a look at that thread to begin with. Rather annoyingly, the new dissensus theme, while really good in so many ways, has rendered the actual pics as very small thumbnails, but they blow up if you click on em.

Some quotes from that thread which birthed the idea:

never mind a dissensus fanzine, we should all be crowdfunding a coffee table book of luka's photography

i would 100% stump up to crowdfund the book

these are so damn good. i'd happily help scan them for a book when this bs is over. serious offer.

(although, interestingly, my own thoughts at that time were for something more lo fi)

Yeah it would properly ruin them to be in a proper coffee table book. Luka deserves better than that. Badly printed straight off here i reckon, complete with all the tangents and digressions. On a shitty printer as wll, not laser. Wet paper, wrinkled by the heavy greens

I then reminded Luke of the idea in a couple other threads: Reservoirs and dams, large bodies of man made water and hackney ragga

do you want us to start a kickstarter to get all those photos of the lea valley made into a coffee table photobook like woebot suggested?

i've called it 'olympic park' for now, and made the money wanted £2500 which i think is sensible.

preview page:

 
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catalog

Well-known member
anyone got good suggestions for a title? I think lukes original thread title is a good subtitle? but what's the killer one or two word title thats gonna become the meme?
 

catalog

Well-known member
scanning the photos...

i got in touch with this company called https://www.mr-scan.co.uk/contact.html and they can scan form the negatives that luke has. they said it would cost something like £150 to do 300 negatives. So for this, we would get back 4000 DPI images in an online format. We need 300 DPI for good print quality.

they recommend snapfish to actually make the books
 

woops

is not like other people
where's woebot, can he do the scanning without the £150 just for the pleasure of producing this seminal document.
 

catalog

Well-known member
got this from a publisher who i know does Amazon PoD (print on demand:

"I've never done color with PoD, but I've had better luck with image reproduction using Lulu. You can always upload something and run a proof to see how it looks. I recommend using InDesign for layout in conjunction with Photoshop for image refinement."

I've got indesign and photoshop and could make a proof once we've got the image scans.

Amazon print on demand works on the model where you don't do a print run, of say 100 or 200, in advance, paying up front. You literally just buy from Amazon. So it's way less money up front, and you are using Amazon's economies of scale. I guess there might be some ethical considerations, but I'm OK with it.
 

woops

is not like other people
where are the eminent dissensus publishing grandees, john eden's woofah has made modern history
 

catalog

Well-known member
@john eden has already been very helpful with the link to catford print. they can do both softcover and hardcover books, and they are not too expensive. i phoned them up and they were very helpful. they said we need images at 300 dpi and you submit a print ready pdf. they do a proof copy.

the only issue with them is that the books, whether softcover or hardcover, are not 'layflat', so not strictly speaking coffee table. i think this is cos the binding is a cheaper 'perfect bound' method ie all the pages are glued together at spine. rather than the more trad method of using signatures of 8, so the book is loads of little bits put together. this allows the lay flat.

but, i've even been thinking, if we restricted the number of pages, we could even go for a very nice simple saddle stitch.

so it depends on the image count, maybe i should go back through the original thread and count the photios.
 

catalog

Well-known member
i checked with snapfish who were recommended by Mr Scan as a decent mid-range printer.

I asked for costs for softcover, layflat, 60 pages, a4 size and they said it would be about £2500 for 100 books, but possibly there would be a largish discount for a bulk order. I'm just waiting on their reply on this.

EDIT: snapfish just replied, would be £2500 with the discount.
 
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catalog

Well-known member
just been goig through the photos again and by my count, there are 54 for the lea valley and 404 for the rest of london. so i think it's a broader book than just the lea valley.

I had an idea for the title: Luke's gone London.

These lines also stuck out: 'Nostalgia for the real world' and 'Built environment as locus of memory' but I'm not sure they can be made into a title.
 

catalog

Well-known member
not checked blurb properly yet sufi, i think it will be similar costs to snapfish or lulu though, as they are printing each book as a one off pretty much.
 
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