My first published book of photography!

Today I received my copy of the photography book I’ve published, Eric Mesa’s Top 40 flickr Images. It’s a great feeling to finally have the book published after having worked on it since April. There were a few false starts with the publishing process as I figured out how to make sure my final PDF could be printed on Lulu.com’s printers. But the journey is finally over and I was able to make the book available to the public today.

One of the interesting things about basing a book on my top rated photos on flickr is that they not only changed while I was writing the book, but even now they are radically different in some places while remaining the same in other places. It’s a snapshot, no pun intended, of where my work was at one particular point in time - April of 2006.

So why make a book of images freely available on the net? Well, there are two reasons. The first one is that Internet access is not yet ubiquitous and there’s a certain something about books that people still love. I know that I am a very technological guy, but I just don’t enjoy reading a book off my computer screen. I prefer good old paper and used to even print my college readings when they were given as PDFs. The second reason for the book, is that when I put my pictures on flickr, I usually don’t put any comments along with the picture because I want others to enjoy the picture through their own eyes, not the filter I have set up. I’m not a total purist, as I do give the pictures titles and thus a frame of reference. But beyond that, I don’t want to talk about what went on behind the picture or even the technical aspects if it happens to be a complicated one. In this book, I take each of the pictures and talk about how I got the inspiration for taking them, some of the technical difficulties, and sometimes the plain dumb luck involved.

I know it sounds a bit cliche, but I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed putting it together.