Once upon a time, a long time ago, I used to make scrapbooks of holidays I went on. I’m pretty sure that somewhere in my parents’ house are various 20-year old ringbound paper scrapbooks from WHSmiths full of postcards, entry tickets and sellotaped-in foreign coinage, and poorly written diary entries that I moaned about having to keep up-to-date. Still, it started a habit. It translated to keeping diaries in notebooks and photos in photoalbums, and entry tickets in large piles in places where you’re going to kick them over every other day whilst you work out what you’re going to do with them (I kid you not – I had a pile of tickets and leaflets from Japan stashed under my computer desk for a year and every other day they flew all across the room. Currently I have a pile of Germany touristy stuff piling up on a bookshelf).
Now I’ve got to the stage of creating photo books. This is partially a financial measure – it is, it turns out, cheaper to create a large hardback book and get it printed and mailed to you than it is to print off the photos, and then buy enough photo albums and photo corners to store my holiday photographs. It’s also easier, given that I primarily shoot digital, to create a book on my computer, upload it and have it printed. I can have an ‘album’ and, if I want, print off a few favourites to hang-up around the house (though, honestly, my lomo habit keeps me in wall decoration). I also, now, prefer the look. It started getting really hard to find the only photo albums I really like – those ones that require photo corners and that have a layer of paper between the pages. Nowadays you can only seem to get the ones with the layer of plastic that covers the photos (and wrecks them if you ever try to get them out again – which you might want to do if your negatives ended up in a sticky situation), or the slip-in ones that I have always loathed. So books. They give off that nice self-congratualatory feeling of professionalism, and that completely undermining realisation that you might need to recalibrate your monitor or not process your photos with a lamp on over your head… And you can scan tickets and so on and put them in as well (this is what I did with the Japan stuff, and then I put it back under the desk for another six months – it’s in a box in the loft now…).
All of which is a long way of getting to the bit where I totally recommend Blurb for doing this, because their software is easy to use and pretty much lets you do whatever you want, their prices are pretty good, and the end product is really really nicely done. You can also sell copies to other people if you’re so inclined, though I really don’t care so much about that.
Anyway, this is what the end result of my latest looks like:
