Welcome to Monday again everyone!!
I hope we all had a productive shooting weekend?
I would like to say I did but alas, I did not. This weekend dissipated faster then a family size pizza in front of Meatloaf. I simply did not have the hours in the day to shoot something, and although I try to keep my camera on me at all times, truthfully every once in a while My beloved tool gets left alone for a few days at a time, and once the day had come to an end I was far to exhausted to shoot anything during the night. But if your anything like me, you'll know the feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you think about the lack of work your have done and that litlle voice in your head starts to call you lazy and UN-committed! ok so maybe only I have voices in my head but you get what I mean. But what do we do when we have nothing to shoot, or we simply run out of time, but we still want to contribute something to our art form?
Well as I settled in on a Sunday night with my computer in front of me I went over some of the competition entry's entered into the "Magic hour" photography comp over at Ph.Art HQ, if you have not seen it yet check it out HERE and I noticed one of the sponsors was BLURB Now Ive always thought about putting a book together, Simply for myself, but have continued putting it off, assuming it would be a fairly large and difficult project. Never the less I checked out the blurb sight, just out of curiosity.
One hour later I was already about 7 pages through creating my very first book! It was astounding just how easy it is to put together. I would recommend anyone that has thought about making their own books to visit BLURB and have a play. There are plenty of previews to show you what is capable through their site and what you may be able to produce, and the pricing is not to bad at all either, for example I am looking at US$17.95 plus postage for a 7x7' softcover book with 80 Premium paper pages.
Without going into to much detail you have a few options, download their free software (like I did) that will take you step by step through each page of your book giving you templates you can use or giving you complete control over the design of your images. You can also create your book in any program you like and export it to them as a PDF, they give very detailed instructions on how to do this, with measurements and down loadable sheets included. So you can have as much or as little control over your book as you want.
I went off the track a little and created a bit of a hybrid theory. I created images in Photoshop to be the size of the pages of the book. To put it simply I created composite images in photoshop and used inserted these as single images into the pages of the book, giving me total design control over what my book will look like. I intend to create a record of my work from my TAFE days right up until now, basically a nice and polished version of my visual diary's from over the years.
However I can see myself using this for portfolio books to send to potential clients and of course as products for my existing clients, and who knows if I create a book good enough I might print a couple of hundred and put it into publication, a service Blur also offers I might add!
SO guys if your into it check out BLURB and have a go. You can see the direction im going in bellow with some of the pages I created for my book "Belief"
Until next week!
GE
