Bookmaking

Last month I made a couple of books. Not serious books but just testing the waters. Blurb has come out with a plug-in for Adobe Lightroom 3 and even better the Adobe Lightroom 4 Beta has a module that connects directly with Blurb. I won't go into all the details about how it all works but I'll just say it makes the bookmaking process even easier. Not cheaper but easier.

The first book is a notebook. I dropped in about 14 images along with about 100 lined pages to write on. I like to have a little notebook around that I can take to doctor's visits, to jot down some trivia that I don't want to lose....stuff like that. This book has black and white images and the images look better than I expected on the matte paper. However, I would definitely change the text on the cover.

The images for the second book, A January Walk Along Buffalo Bayou, was made with the iPhone one day when I went for a walk along Buffalo Bayou in Houston. They are pretty much just straight images. It is a tiny book, 7x7 inches, 14 pages, 28 images, softcover. I didn't do any of the things I know to do to color manage the printing and yet it is really, really close to what I see on my monitor....and the images were made with the iPhone 4s. The camera on that phone surprises me!

Blurb's business model, and maybe the business model of most other print-on-demand publishers is interesting. They don't actually print the book, they subcontract it out. If I order a book today it might come from a printer in Chicago and if I order another one next week it could come from a printer in Portland. If Blurb keeps all their subcontractors on a tight leash with color management, the photographer may never know the difference. Take a look behind the scenes at a Blurb book being printed.

It is pretty amazing that I can order just one copy of a book. And there is a level of vanity that kicks in when you hold a book in your hand for which you did the photographs, editing, sequencing, and design. Yes, I felt a little bit of vanity until I looked back at some other Blurb photography books. I'm still a novice bookmaker.

If you want to see these two books
2012 Notebook
A January Walk Along Buffalo Bayou

Do I Really Want to Make a Blurb Book?

I've been doing one of the things I do best, Procrastinating. What I really want to do is make a Blurb book using some of my Holga images. So yesterday that was my plan for the day. But when I got into my digital files, I decided that the only way, absolutely the only way, for me to do this was to spend time adding keywords to the digital files. That way I could pull all of the Holga images up to look at them and decide which ones would go into the book. That took most of the day because I kept just peeping in a few other files just to see what they were.

That is how you are getting the image above. It was from February 26, 2007 and I was walking into town from the house in San Miguel . . . just shooting anything that caught my fancy. I don't think I ever did a thing with any of the images from that day but yesterday I had to stop and process this image. I liked the soft colors and the contrast of the yellow-green leaves. If I didn't do it right then, I might forget about it. That would be a shame. This image needed to be seen. Okay, so I processed it, even printed it. It makes a nice print. Now you are seeing it in the blog.

You see where this is leading . . . yes, you are right. Not one single image got dropped into Blurb's BookSmart template on Saturday.

Now it is Sunday and it is after 4:00 PM and still nothing has been dropped into a template. This morning I had to watch Sunday Morning News first thing. Then I needed to vacuum the floors and mop the kitchen and bathrooms. After that I felt so grimy I needed a shower. A friend stopped by to bring us some fresh produce from her garden. Then I needed a little nap.

What am I doing now? You got it. Writing a blog. Still not a single image has gone into the template for the book. I could write another whole blog on why I procrastinate. Oh wait, I think I've written about that before . . . here.