Making a photo book

[MarkBarbieri]

I decided to make a photo book. The smart thing to do would have been to use an online book printer, stick the pictures in their templates, and have them do the hard work. But that's not what I'm doing. Instead, I'm laying everything out in Photoshop, printing everything on double-sided paper, putting everything into signatures, and binding the book myself. I did a 4"x4" book over the holidays and it came out better than terrible, so I thought I'd go bigger and make a 8"x10" book with pictures that span between the two pages.

The book will be called Things We've Seen. It's a collection of interesting (to me) pictures my wife and I have taken over the years of places we've been and things we've seen. I deliberately excluded pictures of us because I wanted it to have more a generic look. I'm working on several more personal book ideas as well. Although this one does include a picture of our backyard and another of a car I used to own. But mostly, it is landscapes, animals, and stuff like that.

Of the 98 pictures, three are 3 Disney pictures. The current set of pictures is here. Each picture is a page image, so includes a side panel with a description, date, and camera settings. Many of the pictures look oddly off center, but I think they'll look better that way when printed. Because these pictures will span across the centerfold of the book, I didn't want important details to get lost in the fold.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

This is my current draft of the title page.

 

[KVH]

I'm curious - what type of paper will you be using? Will if be different dependent on the picture and effect you're trying to achieve? That goes even moreso if you're doing any B&W. What about the printing itself? Toner, dye, pigment? Would love to see how this turns out in the end.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

For paper, I'm using 13"x19" sheets of Red River's 50lb. Premium Matte Double-sided and I'm printing it on a Canon Pro-2000. It's a wide carriage inkjet printer. I don't want to mix paper types in the book.

I'm going to print the cover on a canvas paper designed for inkjet printers. I've used it for canvas wrap prints before, but this is the first time I'll be using it for a book cover. I'll laser cut some chipboard and glue the canvas over that.

I'm still trying to figure out if I want to do more of this. It would be much cheaper and easier to just use a book printing service.

 

[KVH]

Hey, if it was cheap, everybody would be doing it. Good luck!

My only question is - Some of the shots you posted, from my perspective, might look better on glossy rather than matte?

 

[MarkBarbieri]

Hey, if it was cheap, everybody would be doing it. Good luck!

My only question is - Some of the shots you posted, from my perspective, might look better on glossy rather than matte?

I bought the matte paper for a different project idea and then switched ideas. I'm not sure what I'll do for my next book. One good reason for sticking with the matte paper is that it's cheaper. For a 13"x19" grain short sheet, it's about $0.85 vs $1.88 for a similar semigloss sheet. I'm not sure why, but double-sided luster or semi-glossy sheets are expensive. Now, when you look at the total cost of making one of these books in time and materials, the extra cost isn't a big deal, but it's not nothing either.

 

[_19disnA]

I have given up trying to print color photos on a home printer and only use one of the online photo places instead. Inkjet printer use pricey ink cartidges that end up costing more then the printer and the picture quality isn't that good. I also find that if you don't often print color pictures, the jets tend to clog and are difficult to work with. We now only have a black & white laser printer that works great for home use. The dry powder does NOT clog/go bad, so even if you only print a few pages per week, the printer is always ready to go.

We use color laser printers at work for the limited number of things we still print in color, but the high cost of the printer and replacement color powder cartridges make that impractical for home use.

I guess I don't follow having pictures books WITHOUT pictures of people since that is mostly why we take/store/display our pictures. Unless you are pro photographer or are using these to sell your photos, I am not sure who else visiting your home would be interested to see such pictures. Perhaps if you are entering photo contests, you want to indicate camera/lens/setting information but I am not sure why that would matter in general.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

I agree with most of what you say about printers, but not everything. Standard inkjet printers are inferior to standard online photo places. But a good dedicated photo printer like an Epson SureColor or a Canon Pro series printer will produce better results than a standard photo print shop. And you'll have more control, a better selection of papers, and the ability to experiment. To me, printing is part of the art of photography.

But you are right that inkjets require a lot of care. I try to find creative ideas to use them when I'm not printing more photos. For example, I use cheap plain paper rolls to print custom wrapping paper for gifts.

As for the book without pictures, why is that so strange? boBQuincy posted a thread here a couple of days ago with pictures from the park. There were no people in there but I enjoyed looking at his pics. If I ever had the privilege of visiting his house and he had a book of his favorite Disney pictures, I'd be excited to look at them.

I take pictures for a variety of reasons. Some of that is to capture good times with people. Some of it is for the simple art of creating a pleasant picture. I wanted to make a book that was the opposite of a story or people book. A book that was about nothing but pictures my wife and I have taken of things we've seen an experienced together. But I wanted it to be pictures that stood on their own as interesting rather than being interesting only in the context of a story. To me, making pictures isn't just chronicling my life and relationships. It's creating art.

As for the camera setting information, that was my wife's idea. It is very common in photo books, especially those aimed at other photographers because it helps them understand the creative process you used. Maybe they'll want the information to do something similar or maybe it will just help them understand the context of the picture. For my recent book, I put that information at the bottom of the page and the photo description at the top of the page so that people not interested in the technical details could read the descriptions and ignore the technical stuff.

Here's a picture from the book that I think illustrates what I'm talking about. I think it is a lovely abstract image even with no context. But it also helps tell a story of "Things We've Seen". It was taken during 2-week stint with no electricity after our area was devastated by a hurricane. We had parties with neighbors almost every night and during this one, one of the parent's gave the kids glow sticks. I set up my camera and asks the kids to try different ideas with the glow sticks. This picture was one of the results. So it fits the goal of being an interesting addition to a photo book because of its aesthetics, it is even richer in our personal context of "Things We've Seen". And if anyone is inspired by it and wants to do something similar, they now know that shooting at ISO 800, f/5.6, and 10 seconds on a very dark night is a good starting place.

 

[_19disnA]

So everytime you take a picture you also write down the lens/exposure/settings??? Seems like a lot of extra work. For pictures that are obvioulsy some sort of time lapse, anyone who is an avid photographer will realize it wasn't the standard exposure.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

Oh my gosh, no. Way back in the film days, I knew some people that carried a notebook at wrote notes about virtually every shot they took, but I was never one of those people. With digital cameras, the camera does the work for you. And it is often obvious when a picture is a long exposure shot (which is different than a time lapse, which is a video taken at a really low speed, like 1 frame per second), but it helps to know how long. If you take a picture of a waterfall at 1/30s, 1/5s, and 2/s, they're all going to result in blurred water, but the effect will be very different for each shutter speed (and focal length, because that plays into it).

EXIF is a standard that the industry uses to store metadata in pictures. Whenever you take a picture with your digital camera or phone, it writes information into the file that includes stuff like your aperture, shutter speed, ISO, focal length, the camera and lens you used, , whether you used a flash, the resolution of the image, the metering mode you used, the distance the lens was focused at, the camera and lens you used (often including serial numbers), the date & time, and (if the device has a GPS) the location of the picture. In many cases, I can see this data on pictures that people post here.

Below is an example. This is a picture I took in Torèt piazza Castello in Turin, Italy. If you use an EXIF viewer, you can see that it was taken by a Samsung SM-G908U1 (S22 Ultra) with a 6mm (23mm equivalent) focal length, f/1.8 aperture, 1/690s shutter speed, ISO 12, using center weighted average metering, with no flash. It shows that I used Adobe Lightroom to edit the picture. It also shows the exact lat/long I was standing at when I took the picture. All of that information is stored in the picture and anyone can see it with the right tools. I suspect that a lot of people are sharing the location their photos were taken without realizing it.



Incidentally, EXIF isn't the only metadata standard. IPTC is another way to store information about an image. It is heavily used in the media/stock industry. You can use it to store information like copyright notices, information about who took the picture, information about what it is a picture of and who is in it, and stuff like.

And while we're on the topic of hidden photo information, if you have a color printer, it is probably printing its serial number and the date/time in the pictures you print with it. You can't easily see it, because the information is encoded with a pattern of yellow dots. I know, it sounds like some crazy conspiracy theory. If you don't believe me, search on "printer yellow security dots" and you should find plenty of articles about it. Personally, I've never taken the time to look for them to confirm that they are really there.

 

[PrincessInOz]

I used to outsource photobook printing for my vacays. But I found that they just gathered dust on the coffee table. It came down to only me looking at them every so often. I also figured out that most of my friends aren't into travel or photography so I stopped.

These days, I select my favourite 12 or 13 images from the year and turn them into a calendar. Again, I outsource the printing. The calendars have much more cache with my family and friends. I give them away as Christmas gifts and they usually can't wait to see them.

Kudos to you for home printing. Can't wait to find out more during this journey.

 

[klmall]

I do the same! My family appears to now expect them and tell me that it isn't a new year without receiving one.

 

[KVH]

I used to outsource photobook printing for my vacays. But I found that they just gathered dust on the coffee table. It came down to only me looking at them every so often. I also figured out that most of my friends aren't into travel or photography so I stopped.

These days, I select my favourite 12 or 13 images from the year and turn them into a calendar. Again, I outsource the printing. The calendars have much more cache with my family and friends. I give them away as Christmas gifts and they usually can't wait to see them.

Kudos to you for home printing. Can't wait to find out more during this journey.

Emphasis above. I totally get that cellphones have altered society in ways (some of which) we don't fully understand. But when I read this, I was SO sad. As photographers, I think we feel this lose much more so than Joe Average. I will still go my way but, I can see a time (say 30-40 years from now) where such behavior is almost unknown.

 

[klmall]

We have become a society of instant gratification. I know people who take cell phone pictures constantly and rarely do more with them than show them around or post on social media. As cell phones have improved camera sales have dropped. We are a disappearing minority and I agree with KVH that other than some very specific situations such as weddings photography will be very different especially with the advances in AI.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

We have become a society of instant gratification. I know people who take cell phone pictures constantly and rarely do more with them than show them around or post on social media. As cell phones have improved camera sales have dropped. We are a disappearing minority and I agree with KVH that other than some very specific situations such as weddings photography will be very different especially with the advances in AI.

I have mixed feelings about this. I don't want to criticize cellphones because, used well, can take really good pictures. There are plenty of things that they don't do well, but for everyday pictures, they're quite good. When traveling, I find that I often choose to leave my cameras at home because my phone is good enough.

But regardless of how you take the pictures, I worry about the life of digital images. We have family photographs in print form that are more than 100 years old. That's not too uncommon. I think most families still have many of the earliest pictures taken in their families. But will that be true for future generations? How do you plan on passing your pictures down to your children and their children?

And the pictures we have from the past were few and treasured. We have only a handful of pictures of people before my grandparent's generation and only a few dozen of my grandparents. My wife and I have hundreds of thousands of pictures. With that many pictures, how will future generations find ones that are meaningful? That assumes that the pictures aren't lost when a cloud storage account closes, a hard drive crashes, or someone's backup drives get old and unusable.

It's an interesting problem.

 

[PrincessInOz]

We have family photographs in print form that are more than 100 years old. That's not too uncommon. I think most families still have many of the earliest pictures taken in their families. But will that be true for future generations? How do you plan on passing your pictures down to your children and their children?

This is true. My dad recently gave us all a set of family photos that are over 100 years old.
I need to think about adding to that repository.

For my DS, we did take a lot of baby photos and had printed them out. There is a photo album specific for him. But we stopped adding to that when he turned 4.
Good reminder for me to go back and sift through the thousands of old photos.

 

[kimmar067]

...my go-to is Shutterfly....it's painstaking work, but the results are phenom!

 

[kimmar067]

....this is a sample page from one of my most recent books:

[BTW, really funny story behind that center pic...]

 

[kimmar067]

 

[kimmar067]