May Travel Blog Update

Ardvreck Castle, Highlands

Anstruther Harbour Light, Fife Coast

The disappeared blog post. The last post to this blog is gone. After about a week and half I checked on the post and found that most of the photos from the blog were missing—they’d been posted, looked okay when I first put them up, but now they were just gone. I tried to get them back and when that didn’t work I tried to repost them. That was difficult as well. But through all of this nobody told me the pictures were gone. That led me to consider and question the future of the travel blog: for whom was I writing the blog? My analysis led me to the conclusion that although I hoped an audience of readers would be entertained and maybe informed by the photos and stories, the real reason I produce the blog is because I feel good writing it and sharing it. So, readers or no, on I go with a new post, and hopefully the photos will stay in place.

One of the (living) residents of the Muthill Graveyard

Falls of Dochart, Killin

But what to write about—I’m not traveling and I’m not taking significant pictures? What am I doing? The answer to that is the topic for this post.

The William Wallace (Braveheart) Monument--photo taken from Stirling Castle

Cottage in Shadow, Boat of Garten

 
   To keep busy and kill sheltered time I’ve started working on a new book. When I produced Scotland in Black and White: 90 Photos I really liked the results. The book, I think, is attractive, produced well, interesting, and is a bargain ($25 if bought from me, rather than from Amazon at $37.50). Scotland, though, is quite a colorful country, so why not produce a book of Colorful Scotland? That’s the project I’m working on now. This post is about that project; my process of putting it together along with some photo examples.

The White Church and River Earn, Comrie

A Close (Alley) in Edinburgh

The first step was to gather a stock of my Scotland photographs and cull those down to  a reasonable size for a book. I picked out approximately 500 photos from our Scotland trips since about 2012—photos before that tended to be not of a high enough quality because of my equipment and/or photo skills. With the mass of photos selected I went to step two; categorizing the photos into groups which fit telling the story of travel to Scotland and of the country itself. As I reviewed my stock I decided on nine categories which would help me tell my story:  Ancient Sites, Castles and Churches,

Burleigh Castle, Milnathort

Flora and Fauna, Golf,

Kellie Castle and Gardens, Fife

Pheasant on the Run

Bothy and Fifth Fairway at St Fillans GC

Harbors and Seascapes, Villages,

Crail Harbour, Fife

Pennan, a Clearance Village on the North Coast

Landscapes, Scottish Culture,

Glen Lyon Road, the Longest Glen in Scotland (34 miles)

Kilted Barbarian on the Streets of Edinburgh

and Something Different (whatever doesn’t fit in other categories). Step next was to cull the 500 photos down to about 200 which fit the various categories and group them together in files. With each group I then had to pick out the best 11 or so photos so that I’d have a total of about 100. That was harder than I thought—I had too many I wanted to share. I finally selected 110 as the number I could live with which made groups of between 8 and 15 photos per category. That process, from the decision to produce the book to the large group of 110 photos in nine categories, took about three weeks.

Liquid Gold

It has taken about two weeks  now to get the photos into condition to be printed in a book—cleaned up and enhanced from the raw images. With that done I have a stock of photos that almost made the cut list and those are the images I’m using in this post. You’ll have to wait for the book to be able to see the better photos. 

Sunset in Elie on Fife's North Coast

That’s where I am now with the book after five or six week's work at about an hour or two a day. The jobs still to come are to organize each section, decide on and write commentary on each individual photo, put everything into the book template, and proof a dozen times. I certainly hope we are NOT in shut down long enough for me finish the project. I’d love to be able to go work in my usual office, the local coffee shop, to finish the book. In the meantime, it keeps me off the street and out of trouble. I hope you too can find suitable endeavors, Stay safe.

NEXT: I am rereading the journals I write for each trip looking for stories worth sharing. Hopefully I will find a few.