It’s been a while since my last blog post. It shouldn’t be surprising since winter is usually my slowest time to photograph. I fill my time as a missionary in the church office building in downtown Salt Lake City. With our mission schedule, we don’t have a lot of opportunities to get away and travel anyway. That will all change in another month when our missionary assignment comes to an end. We are planning a big trip in June, and I will write more about that in a later blog post.
I mostly want to share a project I have been working on for the last two years. While we were in Hawaii, I took a lot of photos—in the thousands. Other than seeing them on my computer screen as a screen saver and one I printed very large in my living room; those images go unseen. I decided to put together a collection of my favorite photographs from Oahu into a book. Ever since my retirement, I have yearned for a creative outlet. I don’t have much desire to return to the theatre, but I do still want to create. I’m finding quite a bit of joy in producing books. After our Route 66 journey, I made a book of my photographs and prose. Because of the style of writing and the personal memories, it was never intended for public consumption. It makes a nice coffee table book for us to enjoy at home.
Book printing fills the gap of creativity I’ve needed. I don’t actually print the books—I use an online vendor for that. I use my talents and time to write the text, process images, and do the layout in Adobe InDesign. It was a bit of a learning curve jumping into InDesign, but I enjoy it. I’m currently printing the journals I’ve kept since the 1970s. I’ve finished the 70s, the 80s, and now I’m working on the 90s. Each volume is about 200 pages. I’m printing 7 copies of each journal volume; one for each of our 6 kids, and one for ourselves. I hope the kids will enjoy it one day when I am gone and hopefully pass it on to their kids.
So, back to my book about Hawaii. It’s called Oahu Wahoo. While we were in Hawaii, “Oahu Wahoo” was the tag line I used whenever I posted an image on Instagram. I’ve long since left Instagram, but I enjoyed using that phrase, and so I titled my book Oahu Wahoo.
I first printed 15 copies of it for a few friends as a Christmas gift. Soon after, others caught wind of it and began asking for copies. I decided to do another printing and sell it at a modest price, not intending to make a profit. I figured however, that if people were paying for a book, I wanted it to be a little more polished. The English language has never been my strength, and I knew I had a lot of grammar problems with that first printing. I decided to hire an editor. Lucky for me, my niece Stephanie is an English major and cut me a sweet deal. I sent her a pdf of the file for her to review. To be honest, I was rather embarrassed when I saw all the errors, syntax problems, typos, etc. I cringe when I think of the friends I gifted a copy to. Stephanie was kind, helpful, and brilliant. I am much happier with the current version of the book.
The second printing was for 100 books which brought the cost down per copy. I’ve sold over half, but I am still about $500.00 from the break-even point. And so, I shamelessly promote it here in the blog if anyone is interested in obtaining a copy. I’m selling them for $32.00 each, and I even include the postage. If you are local to the Utah or Salt Lake Valleys, I’ll even deliver it to your door. I cover the transactions through Venmo. If you are interested in having one, let me know and I’ll send you my Venmo link. Then, of course, I will need your address.
Best wishes to you all. I promise to write more in the coming months as we begin traveling again.
Cheers!