What's the first thing you do when you arrive home after a wonderful holiday? After doing the unpacking, chucking your dirty undies in the washing machine and recovering from jetlag and Montezuma's Revenge? Okay, what's the fifth thing you do? You want to see your photos, don't you? All those happy memories sitting in your camera just waiting to remind you of the sunburn, the IHOP breakfasts, the extra four inches that you've added to your waistline after those IHOP breakfasts.In the olden days you had to take your 35mm film to Boots to be developed so you had to wait and hope that the person doing the developing wasn't having a bad hair day, the result being that you'd be handed an envelope containing 36 black rectangular pieces of paper.
The beauty of digital photgraphy is that you already know that your snaps are half decent because you've seen them on the little screen on your camera. So you download them to your PC as soon as you set foot inside your home. You ooh and aah over them for a few minutes as they scroll past your eyes in slideshow mode. Then what? They sit in a folder, unloved and forgotten for all eternity. Sure, you can print them out but after the first couple of times you do this you realise that you've just gone through three or four print cartridges at twenty quid a pop so you tell yourself that you'll do it later. And as we all know, manana never comes.
Even if you do print them, what happens then? They end up in an album or just stuffed into a box, never to see the light of day, along with all the old black ones that you got developed at Boots.
Well, I'm happy to inform you that there is now an answer to this problem. I'm currently...er...'resting' as the acting profession has it and I recently decided to use my spare time to do something about all of the boxes of photos that the Brunette and I have amassed during our seventeen year marriage. That's a shedload of photos.
My first thought was to go online to see if any companies were offering cheap bulk orders of photo albums. I'm not a great lover of albums as I get a bit fed up with turning them around every time the photos change from portrait to landscape, but it seemed to be the most cost-effective solution. So I googled 'cheap bulk photo albums', only to see the words, 'photo book', pop up everywhere. "What can this mean?" I thought to myself. I clicked on a link to a company called Blurb.com (there are many others) and I was immediately intrigued.
There has recently been a revolution in the publishing world thanks to the advent of 'print on demand' (POD), which is a form of self-publishing (also known as vanity publishing). Years ago, if you wanted to get your novel, cookbook, autobiography or non-fiction history of Chipping Sodbury into print but you couldn't get an established publisher to do it due to it being too esoteric, too complex or just plain rubbish, you had to pay for it to be published yourself. This was an extremely expensive business, often running into thousands of pounds as most publishers wouldn't consider printing less than a few hundred copies. You would then be left with a garage full of rotting tomes that you couldn't even give away. Now, with POD, you can order a single copy (or a couple of thousand if you are mad) of your meisterwork for not much more than you'd pay for Dan Brown's latest epic in a bookshop (I wouldn't pay anything for it but you get my point).
How does this work for photo books? To cut a long story short(ish), you download a bit of software called 'booksmart' from the Blurb site and upload to it whichever photos you choose. You then click and drag your photos onto Blurb's page templates, of which there are many. For example, you can opt to cover a whole page with one large photo or you can have twelve small photos on a page, with many variations in between, including montages. And it doesn't matter if your photos are portrait or landscape.
You have a choice of three covers - softcover, hardcover with a separate dustjacket or printed hardcover. There are also several book sizes and formats to choose from (e.g. 7x7 ins, 10x8 ins, 12x12 ins, portrait or landscape) and a huge range of coloured backgrounds and themes. As if that weren't enough you can also add text, from short captions to full pages.
My first Blurb photo book was a gift for a couple of close friends of ours (photo books make fantastic presents). It was 70 pages containing 220 snaps of weekends away and parties that we'd been to with them spanning a couple of decades. I chose a black background on premium paper with a dustjacketed hardcover. All for the princely sum of 35 Euro delivered to our door within three weeks, all the way from America. Does this sound a bit pricey? Well, I thought so until I did some quick calculations. The price of developing 220 photos would be at least 20 Euro and a half decent photo album would set you back at least another 15 Euro. Same price. (You can, of course, spend less if you go for a softcover with fewer pages.) But what you end up with is so much more than a mere photo album. It's a beautiful, high quality coffee table book that is much more interesting to look at as each page is different.
It's not just for digital photos either. I've also scanned a load of hard copy photos onto my PC and uploaded them onto Blurb. The only downside with this is that the resolution isn't as high as with digital so you can't usually display them as full page photos. If you try to do this a little yellow triangle appears to inform you that the resolution is insufficient so you just reduce the size until the triangle disappears - very clever. However, I plan to overcome this problem by purchasing a negative scanner. Scanning the photo negative apparently gives a much higher resolution.
I've also put together a couple of holiday photo books. Blurb is great for this as you can scan pieces of ephemera as well as photos, e.g. train and show tickets, receipts, menus, adverts, you name it.
Enough already! As you will have guessed by now, I am becoming quite evangelical about photo books. And the absolute bestest thing about them? Once you have a bookcase full of them you can clear out all those boxes of photos from the spare room and put them in the attic.
The best invention since the DVD.
Say cheese,
oldblodger
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