Photobook: a Year in Rotterdam
My own photo book, in large stacks at bookstore Donner, featuring a selection of the thousands of photos I’ve taken of Rotterdam over the last few years—well, that’s a dream of mine. But a hard dream to realize, because the necessary investments are considerable, and the chances of recouping that money are slim. Okay, so let’s start with a very limited edition.
Offer
A few weeks ago, I saw an advertisement on Facebook from Saal Digital GmbH. As those last four letters suggest, it’s a Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung, a German company which apparently wants to enter the Dutch market. They offered me a voucher for a “professional line photo book” worth one hundred euros. I still don’t know exactly what the word “line” refers to, but the offer definitely caught my interest.
Now, such offers are often only valid with a minimum purchase of several times the amount. But this was different. Only the shipping costs weren’t included. And with that hundred euros, I was able to order a photo book with thirty pages. Almost A3 size: 42 x 28 centimeters, to be precise.
Full color
A great opportunity to, at least partially, fulfill an old dream: publishing my own photo book about Rotterdam. It costs a hefty amount of money to actually get such a full-color gem published. And the chance of at least earning back that money is not very big. But by printing such a single copy photo book, I’m at least playing with the idea. And who knows where that might lead.
Archive
Of course, a photo book needs a theme, to assist in making a selection from the enormous collection of photos on my hard drive. I have almost 12,000 photos (and counting) of Rotterdam alone, taken over the last twenty years. Okay, those photos from the 2000s, taken with my first digital cameras, don’t really meet the standards of today. And the photos from my HDR era, in the mid-2010s, may be a bit too excessive in retrospect. But still, there are thousands of photos to choose from.
Seasons
Often, the season or the weather are the prime reasons for me to take photos. So that seemed like a good theme. Rotterdam from the mornings of January, through the rare snow and ice ages, the exuberant spring, the sweltering summer, the colorful autumn, through misty and rainy days to the evenings of December. In other words: A Year in Rotterdam. The fact that the photos were not all taken in the same year is an artistic liberty I allow myself.
After a long and judgmental selection process, I still had about six hundred photos left. Exactly one hundred of them, though that’s just a coincidence, ended up in the book. So the book could’ve been six times thicker; well, who knows, maybe in a second edition.
Design
Saal offers several options for designing the book. You can create the design online, or you can download a special software package. But you can also create your own PDF using InDesign templates provided by the company. I chose the latter option, but I kept the design quite simple in the end; let the photos speak for themselves.
Quality
It took a few days, but then I finally had my dream photo book in hand. And I have to say, it sure doesn’t disappoint. The photos are razor-sharp and in exactly the right colors. The interior pages are made of particularly sturdy photo paper, and the cover is also exceptionally solid. In short: the “professional” they promised me was definitely delivered by the Germans.
Digital flipping
For now, it will remain at this one copy, which looks great sitting on my coffee table at home. But luckily, there’s an option to digitally flip through the book online. Simply click on the image below. Don’t forget to select the fullscreen option by using the icon at the bottom right.
