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My Book & Expanding Photography

This section, we're going to talk about my photo book. So back in November or December 2018, Thought Catalog reached out to me. They're a company out of New York and they also do book publishing. I had worked with an agency that shares an office with them. The agency showed them my work and they reached out asking, "Hey, do you want to make a book?" And we hopped on a call, they sent me some PDFs and stuff, and I said, "Sure, I'd love to make a book." So I was traveling at the time, and fast forward a month or so, I got home for Christmas to find a check from them, and I was like, "Oh I should probably take this a bit more seriously." At first I thought it would just be fun to make a book, but I guess this was like a little more bigger than I thought, so from then on, pretty much all of January and February, I spent most every day, probably five to 10 hours a day, working on this book I have here in front of me. I basically threw all my images into Adobe Illustrator and pieced them tog...

ether, one by one, making these collections of images. It literally looked like a hurricane had hit my Adobe Illustrator document, but it translated nicely. I passed on the assets to KJ from Thought Catalog and she laid this book out beautifully. And several months later it is finally printed out and in the flesh. So the purpose of making this book, I wanted to focus on photo collections. As I mentioned, I was focusing on making those the entire time in that document. Instagram, social media, all those platforms cater to really showcasing a single piece of content, a single image, and there's nothing wrong with that, but I just wanted to go the opposite way and focus on sharing a collection of images. And that's exactly what was in my Adobe Illustrator document. I didn't really have a plan, but having all, like I probably had a thousand images to start in that document, having them all laid out in front of me, I could just piece these puzzles that weren't actually puzzles together and make what is this book. So that's how the book came to be. It was very random. I wasn't expecting it. And I'm very thankful I did it though. And without further ado, let's actually get into it. So the cover was mainly KJ's idea. She just took some of my images and made it look nice. And we open up to the cover page, and these are just a bunch of journal entries from a previous journal. Most of them are written when I was making this book, so you kind of get an inside perspective of all the chaos that was in my brain at the time. We flip through another page, a little forward. That's a photo of me, some more writing, and then we get right into it on page six. And the other thing I wanted people to get from this book is to not move so fast through it, and I made that a point in like a lot of my social media advertising for it was to take your time to really just dwell on it, to look at the images, take them in and not just rush through it. And like, I mean, Instagram, you're just phew, phew, phew, just flying through images and not really taking it in. I wanted to do the opposite for this book. That was a big part of it, so if you end up getting this book, take your time. There's 147 pages worth of different collections throughout the book, but I want to highlight a few that are some of my favorites. Page eight and nine are some black and white film photos from Hawaii. They're all underwater. I was shooting on a Nikonos Five or Four camera, and it's all film, it's all Tri-X 400, I believe. This is from one of my first trips to Hawaii, and I actually ended up moving there after it. So as you're taking your time through the book, one of the objectives I wanted people to do is to take it in, perceive it for themselves, and just ask how does it feel to them? I don't want to go in and explain how it makes me feel because it'll affect, you know, the viewer's view of it, and really the point is for each their own, like appreciate it like an art museum, like how does that art piece make you feel. Apply the same idea to it. So this collection reminds me of my time in Hawaii and all the feelings that come along with that. And there's something so special about film and it really brings back a lot of great feelings from my time in Hawaii, so. Page 26 and 27 is a bunch of more serious portraits of some friends of mine. Contrary to the last collection I showed you, these are all drawn up from completely different years, completely different locations, people, time, and even different camera mediums. So there's some Mark Four images here, Mark Three, there's some Pentax film photos. There's some more photos around here. There's some Pentax photos, and that's most of the collections in this book is just a random conglomerate of photos that looks good together that creates some sort of feeling to them. So for this section, it's a more serious mannerism on their faces, more you could say it's more editorial style, but that's what I wanted to convey through this, a more serious emotion. It also makes up a bunch of different memories for me, which is really fun, and the page prior is also a bunch of different portraits, but more focused on a, like a easy smile type feeling. And it's just fun to look back at these because I remember all these moments and the location and then like where I was at in life then, and yeah, it's just really fun to visit these and think about that for me. And so as you view these for yourself, ask yourself, "How does it feel?" So we go on, and another section I want to talk about is this section. So it starts on page 36 goes through 37, 38, 39, and then 40, 41. The first two pages focus on people in nature and interacting with nature and taking it in. And you flip to the next page and the same thing. It's a little more, a little more energetic in both of these photos, but it's still people experiencing nature and just loving it for what it is. And you flip to the next page and it's one of the very few pages with just landscape photos and it just goes right in to nature. So it's almost like a storyline, at least that's how I saw it of, you know, people experiencing nature then boom, there's just a bunch of nature shots right there. So yeah, that was the idea of that collection, and that's how I wanted to make it. You can keep flipping through the pages and see more collections as you wish. Take them in for yourself. But this book was truly like the best education I never asked for. When you come to the last three sections, they're a lot bigger. The last three sections cover, I think, like the last 30 or 40 pages: my first trip to Alaska, my Iceland trip, and the last section, which I titled "The Homie Section." I won't go too in depth on these. There's some writing in here you can read for yourself. And it just kind of explains the feeling I had when going to Alaska. Before I even started photography, I was just enthralled with the idea of going to Alaska. And Willie, the guy who you saw earlier, happened to just get me a cheap job up there one time. And he was like, "Hey, we'll pay you for your ticket to come up here, and you can shoot this job, and you'll get paid for that, and you can spend 10 days in Alaska and stay at my house." And I was like, "Hell yeah!" Like let's do it. Like I was stoked, and there's this quote I have in the book, as part of the writing on the left side, but it explains it perfectly. "It was Alaska and I didn't care what the job was or what I was being paid. I think one of my greatest challenges in life will be to experience this feeling again." It was really cool to revisit all these photos so many years later, because it brought back that same feeling of going out to Alaska for the first time, this dream of mine that I'd been wanting to do for so long, and it finally happening completely unexpectedly. I might have cried leaving. Iceland was another situation kind of like Alaska. It was just like this place I had been wanting to go to for so long and take photographs of, and it was very last minute too. I think I bought my ticket three weeks in advance. I hit up a couple companies and got like a deal on a good defender rental and just like made it happen. I made it work. And looking back at these photos reminds me of that time. It was just this, I think I, I'm pretty sure I spent like half my bank account at the time just to make this trip happen. I went really hard in the emails to like make sure I wouldn't come back completely broke. And I actually made like a little bit off the trip too, and it just reminds me of that time. It brings me back to like the days when it was just, you were just doing it. Like it, like this was such a fun trip, and it brought me back to all those memories, so I'm very thankful for this section, and to have the chance to revisit it, and create this section for the book, and also having Sonora's writing like, just makes it that much better. In the last section, it's the one that means the most to me, and I titled it "The Homie Section." It starts off with this quote: "A shared joy is a double joy, and a shared sorrow is a half sorrow." It just illustrates the point of the homies, like the friendship and having them around is the most important thing, and that is, hands down, the best lesson I got from revisiting all my photos from my entire career. The photos from this section are photos you wouldn't present to a client. They're not going to be on your portfolio page, but they hold value in such a different way. And that like, that's what it really taught me, like that was the overarching theme of this book, it taught me what I actually cared about and really highlighted my values that much more to me. There were photos I was so stoked on back in the day that I just like didn't care about now, and there were photos that I never even touched that surfaced themselves into the homie section. It was a great lesson on perspective as I saw this shift in realizing, okay, like, you know maybe this performs well on Instagram, but three years later, it doesn't matter to me anymore, but that photo I never even bothered editing, that's what matters to me now. If you are thinking about doing a project like this, a bigger project, whether it's a book, a zine, or something else completely, I encourage you to do it so much. Like I said several times, it is the best education I never ask for, and it's so important to see your work live beyond just Instagram. To see your work in a physical medium brings about a whole new view of it. It's just like more important. And if you're limiting your creativity to just a social media app, or a YouTube, or whatever it may be, it's limiting. It's so, so crucial to take your craft and let it live beyond just an app, so make a book or don't, up to you, but don't let it just live on Instagram. That's all.