I’m very happy to announce that my new book, “China: Six Days in Shanghai and the Water Towns of the Yangtze River Delta,” is now available through my Blurb.com bookstore.

This is the first book in a series I’m calling “The Journals of a Travel Photographer.” There are several more planned in this series and a few of them are already well into production, so they should be joining this one in the bookstore soon. Each title in the series will document a particular photo gathering trip that I’ve taken and this first book covers a 6-day press tour to China that I joined in 2008. The photos appear more-or-less chronologically as they were taken throughout the trip. The images do not provide a complete, in-depth study of the region but, rather, document that particular trip and the things I experienced during that week. As the books will illustrate, there wasn’t always time to wait for the perfect weather or perfect light on most of these trips, but many magical moments still managed to occur and — hopefully — I captured a few of them.

This self-published series is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. The books will allow me to share images that otherwise may not ever appear in print. They will also allow me to show a broader collection of images from one destination than would typically be possible in a short magazine story or an individual stock placement. Having been on the design side of magazine and book production in the past, I understand that photo editors have their reasons for choosing to use one image over another for their specific purpose. The shot that I like most, might not be the shot that tells the story they need told, or that fits their particular layout. Here, I get to choose the images that are used and I get to tell my own story.

I’m using quite a few images, too. There are over 100 photos in this first 80-page book, and yet several of them are full page or even larger. Text is fairly minimal with a brief introduction about the trip and captions that tell about the location and perhaps a bit about how the photo came about.

I also see this series of books as being a way for me to say “thank you” to all of the people that have helped give me the opportunity to travel to these amazing places. Some of the trips covered in these books were press trips and I’ve not always had a way of sharing the images I made with the people who hosted me. If I get a clip or two from a stock image placement or a story that I’ve supplied photos for, I send them along, but I often never receive samples of my images in print. These books will give me a way to share more of my images with those people who helped make them possible.

The books in this series will be available in both softcover and hardcover editions, with slightly better paper used in the hardcover editions as well.

Here are a few sample spreads from the China book. You can find more information on my website or you can “flip through” a partial preview over on the Blurb site.

As I mentioned earlier in this post, this is just book one in a series. Stay tuned for additional titles, coming soon. And thanks for your interest!