For those who may be unfamiliar with the term, "frequency change approved" is a phrase used by Air Traffic Controllers, granting an aircraft permission to switch radio frequencies. It’s also the name of a blog Nate started last year. While he hasn’t been active on the blog much in recently, I really like the name - so I stole it. Now before you get upset, I stole the name to use on a project - a project I was creating for him!
For his main gift this year, I created a photo book, using imagery Nate captured throughout 2011. I may have mentioned it before, but Nate is an aspiring aviation photographer. He’s relatively new to it & doesn’t have any fancy equipment, yet many of his photos can hang in the mix against those with more experience and more expensive cameras and lenses. Yes, my boyfriend awesome :)
The official name of the book is, “Frequency Change Approved: An Exploration of Aviation Photography”. I love this book. Even if I had not made it, I’d want to buy a copy. But then again, I’m a total aviation nerd.
This project was one of my best as far as trickery and deception go. I actually worked on this at night, often with Nate nearby. I sneakily downloaded many of the photos from his Flickr account and then nonchalantly asked him for larger images of some of photos, telling him I was going to create art projects for our walls (which I do intend to do, so it wasn't a complete lie!).
There were so many images that I ended up spending hours sorting them into categories and rating them in Bridge. The 4 and 5 star winners went into the book (sorry 3 stars, there just wasn’t enough space). Sorting the images and deciding how to group them in the book was by far the hardest part. Once I had that down, I uploaded them and began to fill up page after page.
I created the book using Blurb's Bookify software and was very satisfied with the program. I'm not a fan of downloading one-off software onto my computer, but something that works as easily as this is well worth it. It saved me a lot of time (as opposed to working online) and worked pretty much flawlessly through the entire process.
Here are a few of the finished pages:
I must say, when the printed copy arrived in the mail, I squealed with joy - the book was perfect! From the semi-gloss cover to the upgraded luster paper, it was exactly what I expected (which if you know me at all, you know I set the bar really high). In fact, I was so satisfied with the quality that I’m going to order my Holiday Memories 2011 album through Blurb as well.
If you'd like to look through the full-version of the book (I'd highly suggest it!) you can view it here on Blurb or via the slideshow below.
Thanks for stopping by and taking a peek at Nate's present (and letting me brag just a little bit)!
