For my photo book, I have decided to focus on a simple, minimalistic layout aimed at truly emphasizing the images. I will be laying my images in a square format in the centre of the page, leaving a large area of blank page between the image and the edges of the sheet as shown in the image below

I am incorporating archival images alongside images I have recreated myself as well as original written text extracted from the back of my grandfathers photos. Originally, The archival images were yellowed due to age and I for one didn’t like this effect, and I also realised that it would be harder to replicate the yellowing on my reproduced images so I took the decision to convert all images to black and white for the project. With regards to the handwritten text, as the text was written on the rear of the images there were a lot of blemishes and marking on the paper due to the age of the images so I therefore had to go through a process to elinminate these markings and extract the whole text. I set the whites to positive 100 and the blacks to negative 100 after desaturating the image, this then made the blacks of the written text stand out from the image and gave the image a whole white background meaning that only the text was visible when incorporated into the photo book

I have decided to use a landscape shot of the RAF base my grandfather was stationed at as a front and back cover for my photo book as I find that using portrait images would straight away give away aspects of the book, as well as the fact that I feel using the landscape can act as a metaphor as in the images were taken within the landscape, so therefore the landscape image covers the book and it contains the images taken from within that landscape. I desaturated the image and adjusted the colour filters to create an aesthetically pleasing black and white image as the cover. I then used one of the original images of written text to add to the top right hand corner of the front cover to act as a title for the book, with the book being titled as ‘Myself’. I find this is quite a fitting title as using both images of me and my grandfather within the book helps create a sense of identity, as well as the fact that my grandfather was a huge role model to me, so in many ways, I see elements of him in myself and my personality.