Has anyone made a photobook?

gentle lemur

gentle lemur

Well-Known Member
15+ year member
I have just made my first one, to show off my grey seal photos from Donna Nook. I used Blurb Make your own book. Make it great. to produce a 40 page 8 x 10 inch softback book, which actually looks remarkably professional :)
Blurb offers 3 different software tools, I used BookSmart (the medium difficulty one). You have to download the software, and then you can design your book page by page, entering text and photos (more photos than text in my case ;)). I enjoyed the job, because I found it quite easy, but it was time consuming - with practice I got faster, particularly as I saved my templates etc.
I have a colour profiled monitor, so I tried to use the colour profile of the Blurb printers to match my original photos. It wasn't quite perfect (the blues were a little undersaturated) but not at all bad. Then I uploaded my file to Blurb, and waited rather impatiently for 10 days while they printed a few copies.
I want to make a revised version, without any typos :rolleyes:, and more photos of baby seals. It might even get a few sales from the Blurb website - if I priced them at around £15 (which is far from cheap :(), I could arrange to donate the profits to the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust, which looks after Donna Nook.
Has anyone else had a go at something similar?

Alan
 
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One of the advantages of the digital age is there is so much more you can do with photographs now. Since I work full time at a professional photo lab, I can speak from firsthand knowledge.

Up until about a decade ago, there was no way (within a reasonable budget) to produce your own illustrated book. You had to go through a printing press and have color plates made and do a run of at least several hundred books. Of course, this is still the way it is done for books with large runs that are for sale.

But now anyone can produce a professional quality book online and order just one (or two or three). Lots of places offer this, including my lab Jones Photo.

For us photographers, it is certainly a lot of fun. I did a book for each of my Europe trips (Fall 2009 and Fall 2010). I wanted it to be like a photo album, with photos listed by day and captions underneath, so I did my own layout in Photoshop Elements and then uploaded them as standard full pages in the book software. But our book software also has its own templates for people who want to do the layout online and don't know how to use Photoshop.

I agree with you, ordering a photo book is great and I would encourage all the serious photographers on this site to pick a selection of their favorites and give it a go. (If you live in the U.S. and you do not have a local place to order from, my lab ships anywhere in the country - hint, hint).
 
what a wonderful idea. i'm going on safari later this year and a photo book would be a lovely souvenir of my holiday.
 
I want to in the future but need some more practice taking pics first - don't know how I'd theme it or if I'd just have it as a random set of pictures. If I did theme would either likely be Chester Zoo or rarely seen species :D
 
Alan was kind enough to give me a copy of his fantastic photo book. I think it goes without saying that the photography is excellent and one image flows beautifully into the next, but it's also quite clear that a lot of time has gone into the layout and choice of words.

Colour profiling is an absolute minefield - I've got calibrated screens and printers but there are still a lot of "gotchas" - so I was impressed by the reproduction in Alan's book and I don't think I'd have ever noticed the under-saturated blue if he hadn't mentioned it.
gentle lemur said:
I could arrange to donate the profits to the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust, which looks after Donna Nook.
Click to expand...
If you do decide to do that at some point, then I'd thoroughly recommend it to everyone, not just as a coffee-table book but also for those serious about photography and the life-cycle of the seals, something it captures in a really unique and engaging way.
 
Thank you for these comments. Quite a few of the photos are in our Gallery here - but seeing them on paper is a rather different experience. It will take me a while to revise and improve the book, but I will try to do so.

Alan
 
If anyone is interested in using Blurb to make a photobook, PM me to learn something to your advantage ;)

Alan
 
Id happily buy a copy as my favourite animal is the Seal/Sealion and i was hoping to get to Donna nook at the end of last year but with the snow and bad weather this couldnt be made possible. Im hoping to plan a trip for this winter and hopefully by then i will be able to take better photos :)
 
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