Ben Roberts recently published a promo book via Blurb called One More Night about London’s electro-indie scene. I was curious about the project and process and Ben agreed to do an email interview with me about it.
First question: did you get your copy of the book yet?
Yes. Hardback. Pages look good and I’m happy with the layout. Not happy with the quality of the hardback covering, so will be getting some softback copies instead. Does the title come up in full on the softback or has it been cropped off so that the letters aren’t complete?
I’m pretty sure the letters are cut off a little bit, but I assumed it was supposed to be like that. I’ll double check at home when I have a copy in front of me.
You told me earlier that, ” the project came about fairly organically. I shot a few club nights as a favour for a friend who is a promoter - I was surprised that I quite enjoyed doing it (as it’s not the kind of photography that I usually do, or that I am ‘into’ as such)… some of the images got seen by other people and I started picking up a few paid gigs to shoot for different venues.”
When in this process did you think that this might make a good full-fledged project?
After a couple of gigs when I realised that I had a handful of decent portraits. I don’t consider this to be a particularly profound, meaningful project by the way. My main intention when shooting it was to make a promotional book to give to clients to show what I can do if sent on assignment. So i have no lofty ambitions for the work that I have shot. That being said, I think it’s a kind of fun set of images.
When you were initially shooting for your promoter friends, what kind of stuff were you looking for?
The brief was actually pretty good - they wanted more atmosphere stuff as opposed to the normal club shots of hot chicks (okay I took some photographs of hot chicks…) and drunk idiots gimping at the camera. So i could pretty much just shoot whatever I wanted. They also wanted quirky shots - so the details that I shot like the microphones, tangled leads, and interiors - all went down well.
It’s nice to have that kind of latitude with an assignment.
You said that this wasn’t a profound project, but what made you decide to use it for a promo book? Is it because it seems more widely palatable? Have you done other promo books before?
Yeah I kind of figured like it was fairly easy to digest. Of course live music photography has been done a thousand times, as has nightclub photography. However I just thought that maybe I could offer an interpretation that was more visually interesting, diverse and dynamic than the average feature that you might see in a music magazine. That being said, there are a couple of magazines out there that do push the boat a bit with their photography and are willing to be a bit more adventurous. Hopefully this promo book will appeal to them. And it is my first promo book.
Was this book largely a solo effort? Did you enlist others to help with editing, sequencing, or layout of the book?
Yeah, solo effort. Although at various times I invited friends to come shooting/drinking with me if I was going to a club I had neveer been to before. I always had permission to shoot in the venues and never turned up cold. This way I could talk to people about what I was doing and basically have credentials for being there.
Probably about 50% of the shoots were commissions, but for fairly low returns.
Spread from the book
The full bleed photos across the gutter and the single color make for a very bold looking book. Especially coupled with the (unintentionally?) cut off text crowded on the cover. The majority of photo books I normally see are centered images on white pages with big margins. How did you come up with the visual theme?
Yeah the cut off text was unintentional. I’ve only got a hardback copy at the moment - it’s not perfect, it’s a new product from blurb and I don’t think they have perfected it yet - it’s an ‘image wrap’ book - but I lost some of my front over and also had a ‘bubbling’ effect where the vacuum wrap hadn’t fixed itself properly to the paper on the cover. I’ll be ordering paperbacks from now on to avoid this defect.
To a certain extent, the design was born of economics. as I mentioned before, I wanted the book to be a promo - something to leave with selected clients instead of a business card or postcard. The 7×7 square format book offered by blurb was the cheapest - but I didn’t want to crop any of my images. It was time consuming - but I ended up making my own layouts. This meant cutting all my images into two sections in photoshop, and then positioning them over the gutter.
As for the single colour, I think this has worked really well for some images but is perhaps not so successful for others. In some cases I have just made a bad decision in colour selection. In other cases I have chosen the right colour but have perhaps not quite been accurate enough in matching the tone in the actual image. I may end up making a second edition with better colour selections, but i think in general it works for this project, which is really about colour and movement.
How was working with Blurb? Did you give them fully completed spreads, or did you have to work with a desktop or web-based program of theirs to do the layouts?
With blurb you download their own desktop publishing programme. It’s easy to use and has limited features - it’s not like using quark or indesign - but you do have the capability to avoid the various set templates that exist on the programme, and design pages from scratch which is what I ended up doing.
Once you have designed the book, you upload it to the blurb server and away you go.
Because of the design that I chose, resizing and dividing the images proved to be really time consuming. At one point I realised that I would have to go out and shoot a couple more nights just to get some images that were weighted more to the right hand side of the image in composition so that I could finish the book while being rigorous to the design.
