I decided upon using ‘Zawody’ as my final title for the book. This is the polish word for occupations under the context of work synonymous of professions as a form of wordplay due to the forced labour of many Europeans used in the construction of the subjects within my photo-book. The initial title was simply ‘Occupations’ however I had felt that this didn’t bring any personal connection to the title, as such I chose to use the polish translation of the word in it’s stead.

I had decided that I wanted to include a strong graphical element in my title-page and thus I began studying German military markings used during WW2 and looked for one that i believed would be of sufficient impact for a title-page. I decided upon the general composition of the title-page prior to creating it digitally.

The original edit consisted of a deadpan shot of the sea wall, converted to monochrome with very low levels with minimal highlights to suggest the presence of texture. I did this as i didn’t want to simply use a black background due to the lack of room for further experimentation given that approach.

The marking was then created and weathered using blending options on Photoshop combined with a low radius Gaussian blur filter in order to reduce any aliasing produced by the blending.

I later decided that the yellow was too harsh a contrast to the rest of the subject matter within the book and thus brought it down to a more subtle tone.

The decision was later made to have the title-page on the first double page spread of the book instead of as a cover, leaving a linen cover. Due to this decision the title-page once more harshly contrasted the rest of the book, thus I brought up the shadows quite heavily and reduced the contrast. The text and markings were also brought to a tone and colour closer to that of the sand in the images.