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How it Happened
So, how does something like this happen? It started with an e-mail--among stacks of junk e-mail we get at home every day--I actually deleted the first contact! When I realized the editor who was contacting me was serious, I started paying attention.
Kate was one of many editors for the "Waterfalls" book, and her job was to produce the section of the book dealing with concrete ponds. She ran across this web site in her search for pictures.
She asked if I could produce print quality pictures of some of the images on the web site, specifically of the filter, rebar, gunnite, and plaster. Since my passion is photo editing, I jumped at the chance to have pictures printed in a book. Now, I had to dig up the negatives from our pond construction project. Fortunately (call me a pack rat!) I had kept almost all of the negatives from the project which began over 5 years ago.
I first produced web versions of the pictures she specifically requested from the web site. Mind you, these are not glamour shots! As most of you know, there is nothing glamourous about building a pond!
Kate
wanted one picture of the completed pond with landscaping but without
water. Well as you may know, this is wishful thinking. "Completed"
means that the plaster coating has been applied, and in our case, water
was added immediately after that plaster went on. So she settled for finished
gunnite and landscaping. Still not a pretty picture with white calcium
streaks! An interesting footnote about this picture. I didn't have a good
photo of the finished gunnite. Shown here is the "real" picture
(click the picture to see an enlargement)
shows a ladder, a temporary board bridge, and a blue hose trailing over
the rocks. The magic of Adobe Photoshop to the rescue! I removed the distractions
and produced a "pretty" picture which was printed in the book.
Compare to the thumbnail of the completed picture below which is a compilation
of several pictures to widen the view and even adds some lawn!
I sent about 20 pictures to her in electronic format. Each photo was print size about 4 by 5 inches and 300 dpi TIFF format--which means really big file sizes of over 5MB each so all pictures were burned to CD as she advised.
They selected 5 pictures to print, and 15 months after her first contact, the book was published. Since Doug Peccianti of Aquatic Designs was a main character in our construction project , he now has a great way to show potential customers an example of his work!
See the pictures they used by clicking the "Book Pictures" link in the left menu.
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© 2012 Plumjam Photography, Jan Fetler
plumjam.com@gmail.com
