I set up a gray art artist’s board as a background. I shot outside in a shaded area on a sunny day. The camera was on a tripod. My significant other (Harriet) has an excellent eye for arrangement and helped my set up the bookmarks in a rather interesting way. What could go wrong?

Well, our wonderful Canon Powershot S2 was dead – not a battery in the house. Okay, my older Kodak has served my well in the past, but of course, it’s failing. I could coax a few shots out of it, however. Then comes the process of learning how to shoot flat items in a way that reduces parallax. That ended up with me on a ladder. Then came formatting the picture so that the blog title was readable and didn’t look completely out of place. There went Harriet’s careful layout.

Then came cropping images; balancing color, brightness, and contrast; exporting, uploading, and aligning. Rinse and repeat several times until I reach the delicate balance of appearance and frustration. A graphic artist I am not.

So that image at the top of the blog is my best compromise, for now. I think it gets the point across, and provides enough imagery for some future postings. I’m sure I’ll replace it in time, and my technique will improve.

I wanted to make a simple banner image for the blog. Just a few bookmarks; a sampling of my overall collection. I thought I’d start simply enough: just gather what I have into a few drawers to simplify choosing a sample set.

Several hours and 5 drawers later, I’ve gathered the bulk of the bookmarks. It occurs to me that there are more squirreled away in some drawers from recent trips, and I’ll need to move them in with the rest.

And, I made sure that these were just the bookmarks. I separated out all the other collectible do-dads and memorabilia.

The best part of all this was rediscovering my collection. I have a lot of beautiful, intersting, and memorable bookmarks. Many are reminders from trips I’ve taken, several are small works of art, some are antiques, a lot of them are bits of advertising and souvenirs from interesting movies or events, and most I can’t easily explain.

Now I can pick out a few to be photographed for the blog.

I’ve been collecting bookmarks for years, although a better description would probably be accumulating. I think there’s a real difference between an accumulator and a collector, and I plan to start transforming my bins and plastic drawers filled with bookmarks into a real collection. I’ve created this blog to serve as a record of my physical collection, my process of building a collection, and any interesting references and information I find.