So, I’m going through all my photos, trying to choose the ones I want to use for my Blurb book. There are a lot. Although, honestly, it’s been hard to find ones I feel are good just as photographs. I think it would be an easier task if I were going with a theme — all food photographs, for example. Then, it would be enough for a photo to just be of food and to be nice. But I’m trying to pull ones that give me that little ‘ah ha!’ feeling.
I finished (maybe? I guess?) going through my digital folders today, so I moved to the scanned images of my film photography. There’s a LOT less of that, luckily, I guess — it’s mainly all from before the D70 came into my life. I’m pretty sure that photo above is from 2003. Wasn’t that just, like, yesterday? Where do the years keep running off to?
I’ve probably mentioned it before, but the screen saver on my iMac is set to cycle through the images in my ‘picture book’ folder. So every time I edit and save a new batch, I look forward to the screen saver starting up. I’ll say it again: there’s just something exciting about seeing the same old images displayed on a big screen, viewed halfway across the room.
I’m pretty sure I want to print with Blurb — they seem to have cornered the market on POD photography-book self-publishing. I trust their quality a bit more, having never seen either their work or Lulu’s in person. I wish they would print from PDFs, though. I’d rather not fuss with their software, since I am all trained up in InDesign. (You can import your own page images into their software, I guess, but it seems like the silliest, most round-about thing ever.)
I also can’t decide between the 7″ square format of the 8″x10″ (and landscape or portrait?). My plan at the moment it to just get a copy for myself and think about making it available to the public later on (really, it seems like too much of a ‘thing’ to say, ‘Tada! Buy my book!’ I just want a hard copy of some of my favourite digi photos in a nice format.). The 7″ books are quite a bit cheaper than the larger size, but then I think, well, what’s the point of doing this if it isn’t to get something that has a sort of ‘wow’ factor? I mean, the screen-saver-watching effect, and all.
Blah, blah, blah. Just: I’ve taken a lot of photos. And why can’t I remember to convert to CMYK more than 50% of the time?
You could make sure the book also contains some words about your approach to photography. Then you could make it available to others. And then you could think of it as just a really good way of answering questions from people who love the images you produce. You know, if they’ve clicked through everything you’ve posted on Flickr, maybe it’s only polite to allow them a copy of the book. No pushy ego implied or required. x
I love blurb! I did our wedding album in photoshop – it’s quite straightforward to save the pages as high res jpeg and then the blurb software will import them all automatically. Here’s a super helpful site I used – http://theartofengineering.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/want-to-make-a-blurb-book/
From memory I think the 7×7 books are done on a different printer so the quality isn’t as good, hence the price.
Go with the 8×10! You won’t be sorry.
Have fun, and really no matter what you chose it will be beautiful!