Saturday on the couch… with photo books

I  enjoy browsing through a beautifully edited coffee table book. I can see two as I type – one on film classics with stills from classic movies and insightful commentary and another on the great coffee houses of Europe with photos of those lavish rooms and commentary on a bygone era.

These days you can be your own editor. Google quickly throws up at least a dozen companies that will help you turn your digital photos into books.

I have used the same company for about five years and have many, to be honest, thousands of photos, stored with it.

My first photo book was for my grandson when he turned five. It included photos of his great-great grandparents and some family history as well as photos from his short five years. I did the same for my three granddaughters –each book quite different. When my grandson turned ten a book of photos was titled ‘A Decade Of’. My daughter’s fortieth birthdays and my husband’s seventieth have also been marked by such gifts.  

The company I use will ‘auto fill’ the photos in the book, but I much prefer to take the time and place them myself with captions.

I had always kept special books of our travels. The first of these was a road trip we did with our girls from Broken Hill, through the Riverina, down to Melbourne and across to Adelaide. There were photographs, maps, tickets, brochures and a handwritten commentary.

This was the first of a number of such books as we could afford to travel. I felt it was important to record the detail as well as photographs.

When I stopped using film and acquired a digital camera keeping a record of travels became a lot simpler. I took a lot more photos and still kept a travel diary. When I got home I was able to turn these into a photo book.

A trip to Europe on 2014 resulted in many pages of writing as it had been a research trip for us. The front cover is a photograph of the ploughed field at Fromelles where so many Australian soldiers were recently found. There are a lot of photographs and the book is a lot bigger than the twenty pages usually allocated. It was worth the expense.

A recent trip to Singapore of six days, by contrast, is a small soft cover book with photos and not a lot of commentary. I have to confess there are many photos of orchids.

We don’t often get to spend Christmas with both our daughters so when that happens I make a small photo book with a copy for each family as a memento.

My mother used to keep all our photos in a tin. There weren’t many photos of our families or of holidays. You certainly didn’t waste film on scenery. I always took a lot of photos of our children as we lived a long way from their grandparents. Today, any grandparent can whip out a phone and show five variations of a birthday cake being blown out by a two-year-old.

Photo books provide a way to keep photos and to share photos. Making them is also a satisfying and creative hobby.