For the past five years I’ve been documenting our family life with my photos. Motherhood inspired and encouraged me to pick up my camera and capture the ordinary moments and entwine them with the bigger, more momentous ones. I’ve documented first smiles, first steps, first days at preschool and family holidays along the way. But beyond those milestones, I’ve endeavoured to preserve the memory of everyday motherhood; spaghetti stained cheeks, shoes on the wrong feet, bare belly buttons, favourite stories on old quilts. When I look back through my archive of those moments, big and small it’s like looking at our life through fresh eyes. So many of those day to day moments get lost and forgotten from our mind in the haze of family life, but photos are a powerful way to transport us right back to any given moment.
When Bob Books got in touch and asked if I wanted to work together, I couldn’t say no. I’d agonised for so long over how I’d be able to wade through five years worth of photos and bring them to life in print, so it seemed like just the get go I was looking for.
After a fair amount of procrastination I decided the most manageable way to start the task was simply to choose a year between Raff’s birth and today and ruthlessly select my favourite pictures from those twelve months. I didn’t always choose the most beautiful shots, I followed my gut and picked the ones that moved me most when I saw them. When I’m building an album for a client, I like to mix up the spreads to keep the interest going so I adopted the same principle for my own photobook. On some of the spreads I chose to show one or two hero images in full bleed to the edges, and on other spreads I opted to tell more of a story by displaying a collection of images across the spread. I like the way breaking up the layouts from spread to spread gives the album pace.
What I love about Bob Books is the range of options available to you when choosing your album style and type. They offer a number of sizing and layout options for photobooks so you can really tailor it to suit your own personal taste and requirements. I chose a landscape 28x21cm hardback cover album using their classic matte paper stock. The paper has a lovely thick feel to it and the inks seep in nicely so the tones don’t get lost.
Selecting the images, and designing the book took around four hours to complete. I was able to save the design and come back to it so I could break up the process into smaller chunks of time. I opted for the maximum number of pages (154) so there were a lot of spreads to consider but once I got into a rhythm it started to flow nicely. The book arrived a couple of days after I’d placed my order. Holding it in my hands and looking through it for the first time, I was overcome with emotion. Having a collection of photos housed in one beautiful book revived so many memories. I was really impressed with the quality of the book too, it was much weightier than I’d imagined and felt considered, which is quite unusual for a high street print shop.
The kids have absolutely loved looking through it, (about a million times a day), and I’m so excited to make the next one. I plan to create one album each year to document family life as well as one album per year from our annual family holiday. I think adopting the discipline of making them yearly is a manageable way of keeping on top of an ever growing photo archive.
I’m undeniably a sentimental collector. I keep acorns the kids find on our walks, I display shells from the beach in a glass dome on our old chest, I have a shoebox filled with letters from dear friends and a giant scrap book bursting at the seams with drawings and paintings the kids have made. My photos are my greatest and most treasured collection. They are a patchwork of memories and they help me to tell our story. These books are a way for me to stow our pictures somewhere safe yet reachable, so that the kids and I can sit together and look back over the years. So that we can be reminded just how beautiful this life and our love really is.
Bob Books are offering my readers 20% off photobook orders with the code THISHOUSEOURHOME at checkout through to 31st December 2017. For more information follow this link https://www.bobbooks.co.uk/househome
This post is in collaboration with Bob Books. Thank you for supporting the brands that help this space grow.
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