An email arrived from the Kirkbymoorside Allotment Society with the suggestion that at the 2022 AGM, so next November, we have a display of photos covering ‘A Year on the Allotments’. Anyone interested?
I’d already thought about doing it a year or so ago but that’s all that became of it – just a thought. But with my new enthusiasm for publications, thanks to Daniel Milnor, I now started thinking beyond a display of photographs – a book – an annual no less!
I emailed back to say I’d be willing to help out with images and went on to suggest that a book might be the way to go. Indeed some recent sad deaths of fellow allotment holders made me think it could be a lovely way to make a dedication within the book and recognise their role in recent years.
Saturday afternoon turned out to be great with a beautiful blue sky, fluffy white clouds and a bright sharp light so off I headed to the allotments. What better day to start collecting images! I spent an hour and a half walking around the entire site of around 40 or so plots and came home with a similar number of shots. Once I’d edited them I thought let’s make a test magazine using Blurb’s BookWright and see how easy it is.
It was a breeze and a couple of hours later I was uploading my first magazine. It’s very much a test, just as Milnor suggests, to learn about layout, fonts, sequencing, format etc and I’m sure when it arrives there will be things I’ll want to change but an essential first step. I’ve actually started looking very closely at magazine layouts now to see what I can learn. I particularly like the home decorating shop, Neptune, and their Stories magazine it has a format I think I’ll steal ideas from.
So I’ll do a monthly shoot up at the allotments and each time experiment producing a magazine. I’ll reflect on those experiments here but meanwhile here’s some of the October photographs from the allotment:
And here’s three images of the October magazine:
And here’s some from November:
I’ve given my father in law, Brian (pictured above with the woolly hat), pride of place on the front cover for November.
And here are the November and December editions. I think it works well to have a member on the front of each cover so I’ll try to keep that going.
