09/02/07 - 09/15/07

Abby and I have sorted Alex’s portraits. We’ve figured out which portraits don’t have stories on them (about 29) and labeled them. We met with Shane to give him those portraits so he could start by reporting on these individuals or couples. He’s going to go for interesting anecdotes about Arrow Rock and their ties to it, rather than the standard: I am ____, I’ve lived here for _____ and I do _____. He plans on having this mostly done by MPW (note from much later: we underestimated ever so slightly the time it would take Shane to track down people and write good portrait stories). We brainstormed a lot about how to structure the book, and we’ve agreed that Alex’s portraits are going to be scattered throughout, as the unifying theme of neighbors. Right now we’re trying to decide whether or not portraits of people we’ve covered should be with that story or separate. We designed templates using a vertical square (9.5inchesx11inches), and have decided that the most we could fit onto one page would be two portraits, and for some (especially the more interesting ones) we may want to give a full page.

Rick brought in a bunch of books for us to look at, so Abby, Shane and I all flipped through them, discussing the pros and cons of different design. It’s made us realize that the max pics we’re getting on a page is 3, and that’s pushing it. With visual variety and what not, we’ll want a lot of 1’s and twos. That means anywhere from one to three spreads a story (depending on how in depth the story is).

We have counted up how many approximate stories we have: ~45 give and take Lloyd and Leo and Carolee Turner (sp?). Averaging 6 pics a story or so, we’re hovering around 350 (though I think it will end up being more). This puts us at 120 pages or so, but with portraits and what not, I think it will be closer to 180, maybe even 200. At least this gives Abby a number to work from when getting a quote – ask the price difference between a 150 page book to a 200 page book (low and high end).

Abby and I also started our second round of editing, which consists of two starring the ones we’ve moved into our working files that we think are really good (taking into account visual variety and all the good editing stuff we’re supposed to think of). Then we group the two star ones together to the ones most similar to the others, compare them, and choose the best of the best at this stage by three starring those. The three starrers we are copying to another folder (called prints) and are making work prints of these, using a single image on a contact sheet in Photoshop with a name. This is the best part so far, because now we have something in hand, and most of the photos at this stage are decent, so it’s getting both Abby and I really excited. It’s starting to shape things up for us. I think once we get through this second edit, we’ll have a lot better idea of how everything comes together.

We have started with events. We edited in alphabetical order (the easiest for us to remember) the following:

∑ 4th of July Parade (excluding what we might not have of Rita’s, as we despair of actually getting our hands on these)
∑ making and hanging of the greens (which we combined into one folder called 2-greens)
∑ burning of the greens
∑ celebrity visits (hey, we needed to call the whole Celeste Holmes, Johnny Whittaker and Tom Sawyer thing something)

It’s getting to be a lot of fun – I’m actually really excited about the next time Abby and I meet!