By Wayne Cosshall

Photo books are a growing and truly amazing area of printing. And, you can go well beyond a straight photo book.

The popularity of my previous post on photo books indicates that there is considerable interest in photo books as alternatives to the straight print. I am in the process of testing a number of the photo book producers and will have more to report on that in a few months time.

One thing many photographers miss from the darkroom days is the hand-crafting of images that working in Photoshop and making digital prints may not always provide. At first glance, photo books would seem to have similar issues because the books are typically printed by some faraway company and delivered by courier. Yet this would be missing some huge potential.

If you look at the rise of the scrapbooking movement in recent times you can see glimmers of a solution for photographers who crave a more hands-on approach to printing. Scrapbookers use photographic prints, some printed by a retail store, some printed on at-home inkjet printers. But scrapbookers don’t stop with a basic print. They will avidly explore alternative papers, transparent and translucent films, canvas, fabric and any surface they can get a print onto, either directly by feeding it through their printer or indirectly by using transfer techniques. Even then this sometimes isn’t enough. So, they then glue, sew, staple, or otherwise affix other things over the tops of the prints to make collages.

It is time photographers stopped thinking of the photo book like a single image and considered adopting many of the techniques scrapbookers use. Imagine designing a photo book that takes into account what you will add by hand later.

You get the book printed and have it delivered to your home or studio. Now, rather than regarding this as the end of the process, you view it as the beginning. You add all sorts of things to the photo book that fit with the photographic content and your vision of how you want the final book to look. So you may print some additional images on clear film or translucent paper and glue these into the book. Some pages you enhance with hand-drawn or painted designs in ink or acrylic paint. Other inserted pages may have found objects, such as bus or train tickets, leaves, or discarded wrappers glued to sheets of product wrapping, cardboard, or thin metal (which you might have printed on after applying an inkjet-receptive coating).

Covers can be enhanced in all these ways and more.  For example, you can even hand-cover your photo book with leather or tin sheets that have been embossed or engraved.

My point is: Just as a photographic print can either be a final product or simply a starting point for your creative journey, so, too, can be a photo book.

Sure you must make sure that the thickness of the things you glue inside the book won’t interfere with the binding, but there are ways around this if you think outside the box. And speaking of boxes, why not build a stunning, custom box to hold the finished book? You may need to experiment with glues and such, but this itself can be fun and interesting (plus you can learn a lot from books on scrapbooking).

There was a time when the absolute flawless perfection of the digital print was a wonderful thing. Now that the novelty has worn off, we can get back to giving each print the unique and individual marks of the hands of the artist, making no two alike. And this can apply to the photo book just as easily as to the print.

So stop viewing the print or the photo book as the end result, and try seeing it as the starting off point for a great voyage of creativity and fun. For those of us who spend a lot of time at the computer, getting your fingers covered in glue for a change can not only be very creative and liberating, but also very therapeutic and healing. Give it a go, I know I am.