Borsdane and Beyond Photo Exhibition 2024

This year the Borsdane Wood & Rayner Park Friends Group are hosting a photoraphic exhibition, similar to last year, except this time it is to focus not just on Borsdane Woods, but on all of the green spaces in the Wigan Borough.

To prepare my exhibits, firstly I needed to compile a list of potential entries from the many photographs I've taken over the years.

The next step was to look at them all 'as a whole', and as one cohesive body of work.

Thirdly, I then decided if it was going to have a slant, in a similar way to last year's exhibition, where I exhibted exclusively medium format film photographs. In this case I decided I wanted to exhibit photographs I've made digitally, for the reason that I wanted colour this time around. I did also exhibit some photographs from last year too, but those were an aside this time.

Once I'd compiled my main selection, I needed to whittle them down to 20 images. These are the 20 images in the gallery on this page.

Simple!

However, I wanted to do something a little different this time as well. I found whittling the images down actually to be really difficult, and so I decided to also make a photobook of my initial body of work. I kept the design of this simple, and designed the book using Affinity Publisher 2, and I went with a seasonal theme, where the images were sequenced from winter to spring to summer to autumn, depending on which time of year they were taken. Additionally, each image contained a caption for where it was taken around the Borough. It was actually really easy to do, and as I was going to stitch the spine I gave myself a slightly wider margin on the inside edges of the pages.

Once this was done, I drilled and stitched the book. The preparation took around 20 minutes, 10 minutes to drill, and the stitching took another 10 minutes. I went for an asymmetrical variation of Noble Binding.