A lot of this day went in shopping for furniture. I had forgotten how hard it can be, to find just the right thing, easy to sit on, practical, with the right materials and colors. Exhausting!
But there are also easy things. Yesterday I made a photobook with Blurb, mostly landscapes from summer and autumn from the nearby areas. I ordered one copy to see how the result looks and handles.
In addition, I made also a photobook in iPhoto, of family photos. The iPhoto software was extremely easy to use, even more so than the Blurb software. I moved photos around with ease and changed them to new ones, without encountering any problems.
It was a revelation. I have made several dozen books at work, mainly textbooks, and there has always been some problem areas in getting the result right - what material, what size margins, how the covers turn out, and especially the colors, how they may change beyond recognition. But the current print-on-demand technology seems to have progressed well beyond these problems, into a streamlined extremely user-friendly systems.
How the new systems work in practice is hard to say until I have the ordered photo book at hand. But there were none of those inconvenient problems in communicating with the printhouse (at least so far).
I'm getting really interested in the photobook concept. Instead of making single photos, why not start planning whole books? Invent or discover a theme, take enough photos to fill a photobook, order the photos, write the texts, edit a few times, and publish. Worth trying, I think.
This photo was taken today at noon - just before the clouds covered the sky once again.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
The difficulty of buying furniture; the ease of making photobooks
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2 comments:
I'm thinking of making photobooks too. Since the arrival of our son (now 10 months), I've collected almost 2000 photos of him. The hard part will probably be choosing which photos to use and how to arrange them.
Also, photobooks are much more expensive to print at my location.
It seems that photobooks might be also an additional way of storing the photos in a coherent way - the most important ones, organized in a story, printed out so that they are archived outside the digital realm. It might be that this way they have a much longer lifetime than on digital media.
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