Pages: The first Coldbrewed Set
It’s been a couple years now, but even before I had an actual goal for all of this, I knew I wanted to put together custom sets. Without a lot of space to work with, I figured the best place to start would be with something relatively flat, and it doesn’t get much flatter than paper.
Initially I thought to recreate the always popular newspaper set-up. Plastering the wall with news papers and calling it a day. There is just something kinda cold about newspaper, and I wanted something warmer. I could have just gone straight up book pages and still ended up with a warmer feel, but something was missing. Staining the pages with tea was the go to across the internet. Stain the pages with tea for a warm tint and worn look. Tried and true for sure, but that’s when it hit me … Coldbrewed Creative. Why not use coffee? I mean, it was right in front of me the whole time. Plus, I’m way more into coffee than tea.
The first problem … finding enough books I could source pages from without spending a small fortune.
I’m not sure if it was meant to be or what, but after a quick search I found a posting for a garage sale that was about 90% books. I shot a message to the seller and made my way there. I don’t think I’d ever seen so many books in a private residence ever. Well, to be fair, they weren’t in the house. They were literally in crates completely covering the driveway. It was a garage sale after all.
We struck a deal and I ended up with 6 crates overflowing with books.
I probably should have done a little math … or thought things through a little more, because I definitely didn’t need that many books. Especially realizing 80% of them were Tom Clancy novels. Nothing against Clancy, but not really my jam. So I wasn’t even going to be able to read ones I didn’t need to … re-purpose.
Years later, I still have a couple of crates of books just waiting for me to do another set.
With books acquired, all that was left was to pull some pages and get to work. I ended up using the same method most folks use with tea, soaking each page in a pool of brewed coffee. I really do like the result even better than tea. So page after page, batch after batch I began soaking hundreds of pages in coffee and then let them dry.
With a crazy number of pages strewn about the garage, I quickly realized I’d need to figure out how to actually get these things on the wall, but in a way that wouldn’t become a permanent fixture in the garage. I already mounted a seamless paper backdrop mount onto the wall, so I figured why not just attach the papers to … paper. The hope was I’d be able to roll the backdrop up and unroll it any time I wanted to use it. It didn’t quite work that way. I didn’t yet have any actual seamless paper, and I didn’t really want to buy an expensive roll of paper just to ruin it by attaching more paper to it. I did however have a huge roll of packing paper leftover from our recent move. It was also a nice brown color making it blend in even better.
The only real method for mounting these pages I could get to work was glue, and it worked pretty well. I was able to stick pages randomly across the roughly 10ft wide by 10 foot long makeshift packing paper backdrop. It took a couple days to get all the pages up, and then a little while longer to fix it all, once I discovered rolling the backdrop for storage was a bad idea.
With pages set, and plenty of extra books to dress things up a bit, I reached out to some folks to set up some shoots. I had a few ideas, but it was mostly about the set itself more than a specific photo idea. So I let a lot of the models pick their own adventure and theme and we got to work.
I didn’t expect that the set up would be as popular as it was. In hindsight, I should have made this my first venture into charging for shoots, but it was so early on in what my portrait journey that I was just excited to be able to work with models and bring a vision to life. I also didn’t expect that glue, and tape, plus the Arizona heat was going to result in waking up to a giant mess more than a couple of times. I managed to get quite a few different shoots out of it though, and I’m sure we’ll see a return of pages in some way in the future. After all, I still have plenty of books lying around.
