Last night I went to bed with a list of things I was excited to get done today. So I bounced out of bed at 9 am to get started. I began with a trip to Home Depot to buy some cobbles. I came home with cobble-ish pavers. I’ll probably have to go to a stone company to get pretty cobbles. But with five cobbles I could do some practice photography. My sampler book is going to need a cover. So far this is what I’ve got:
Things I like about it:
- The trowel implies a person. It also implies work. Both of these things are part of my book.
- The cobbles in the background give depth and possibly imply a path or a journey. I would like my cover to imply a journey.
- The sprouting tulips imply growth. Much of the content of the book is about growth. However there are no blooms yet, just the beginnings of growth. Blooms are finished, these plants are just getting started.
- I kind of like the bare ground and winter grass as well.
Things I don’t like:
- I’m not sure how to blend this into a cover image. I don’t really want to just bleed it off the edges of the cover.
- There isn’t a clear space for a title. The grassy spaces will tend to obscure the title.
- This picture screams “gardening” and while I do mention gardening, my blog sampler is not about gardening.
- The pavers are not really cobbles. They aren’t natural stones and they aren’t all that attractive.
- My blog talks a lot about parenting and nothing in this image implies parenting. (Or business, which I also talk about. But I really don’t want my cover to imply business.)
So, I’m not sure if I’ve got anything usable. Perhaps I’ll make a trip to a stone company and spend twenty dollars getting some pretty rocks. However if I want to use the sprouting tulips I need to hurry. They could start blooming as soon as next week. I may try doing some “studio” shots of trowel and cobbles against a drop cloth to see what that yields. In the end I suspect that the cover will be something I pull together, am not completely happy with, but will deem “good enough” because I simply don’t have the skills and expertise (nor the time) to make it better. This is one of the things I don’t like about self publishing, knowing it could have been better if I had more training.
So I turned to the words of my sampler book. I’m gleaning through last year’s blog entries and pulling the ones I think are entertaining / representative / useful. I’ve reached June and I’ve got 30 pages or 13,000 words. I’m hoping to make my sampler book slim. I figure it needs to be around 20,000 words. I’ll grab more than that and then choose and rearrange. Two good friends have volunteered to help me critique and edit. I’ve got a lead on a really good copy editor as well. Time is short, but I’m fairly confident I can get this thing done. If I hurry. So I pulled entries until my eyes crossed.
Then I escaped my house and returned to the Beauty in Belief exhibit. I didn’t go through it again. I just snagged a pair of ear rings from the gift shop that I’ve been thinking about ever since last Tuesday. They’re filigree leaves with Arabic script on them saying “The best people are those who help other people.” They are lovely and make my heart glad. While I was there I took a moment to close my eyes and listen to the chanting music again. It warmed my heart.
Now it is 5:30 pm. I discover that I’m not excited about the house cleaning aspects of last night’s list. I’d love to have the house be clean, but the motivation to do the work has gone missing. Instead I’ll probably delve my way through June looking for blog entries to pull. Hopefully tomorrow will bless me with energy and motivation to put my house in order.
I like your photo.
A note: next time try lying down on the ground so you’re on level with them. Maybe it won’t help, but sometimes it does. (Also, maybe you already tried that and it didn’t work. But it’s usually very helpful for making ground objects look good.)
I wonder if adult and child gloves could be added to imply parenting?
It would be awesome if you could get the title on one of the pavers.
I guess I get really excited about this photo stuff. Sorry. 🙂
Thank you. I did try lying down (which I totally learned from you) unfortunately that introduced distracting background elements. Shooting from higher up made the image more static.
I’ve actually got a new idea which I think will be better. If it works I’ll probably post a new picture later this week.
If you want stones that look like cobbles you should come over to our house. We have a huge vacant lot attached to our yard that has lots of nice rounded rocks of various sizes (pebbles to football sized). I’m sure you could find some you like (I can fill a wheelbarrow so that it’s hard to push in ten or fifteen minutes of easy browsing).
Thank you. I may take you up on this if the brilliant idea I had over the weekend turns out to be not so brilliant.
Turn one of your pavers a little bit more and you can write a title on it? For example, that one on the bottom beside the trowel.
I think the thing I love most is the trowel. It says a lot to me about a person, about the things we do, the dirt we grapple with. And you’re right about the emerging tulips. It’s a painful, beautiful thing.