Day 359, 365 Day Project

Today's image is of the Christmas present I bought myself. It is Tim Mantoani's "Behind Photographs - Archiving Photographic Legends". I supported Tim's project by investing in it prior to publication at Kickstarter.com I was intrigued by the book as it had a number of photographer's whom I have had a good fortune to meet inside of it. So I but down my support of the book on faith from what was presented on Kickstarter.

I was not disappointed. The book arrived on the 23rd but as I am teaching my boys the value of patience, I wrapped it and did not look at it until today. The end product is beautifully done and is one of the finest book of photographs of photographers, all created on the giant 20x24 Polaroid camera. The book itself is 11x14 and has been printed to make the photographs stand out. Besides the stories about the photographers and many of their iconic images, there is valuable research in to the history, art and culture of the medium. As I am about to launch a new course at SAIT on this particular subject in May, the information in the book will be an invaluable resource.

I created the above image with a few things in mind. First was to show the book and a selection of the participants for the project. I choose these three individuals, Michael Grecco, Douglas Krikland and Ron Galella as I have been very fortunate to spend some time with each of them. Though I already knew the stories of the images they had chosen to show, I enjoyed seeing them here in the book.

I also wanted to try an new app called Frametastic which allows you to add a variety of images in to a selection of different panels. Knowing that I would have trouble on the small screen of the iPhone, I shot the images of the cover and pages inside using the iPad. This allowed me to size the photo's to fit the frames and then save the final result as one image as seen above.

So if you are a lover of fine photography books or wanted to learn more about some very fine photographers and their stories I highly recommend this book. You can learn more at Tim's website http://www.mantoani.com/