In my last article I spoke about the importance of printing your photos. You can read it here:
Why Printing Your Images Is So Important

In it I mentioned how you should set yourself a little goal to print out a small collection of photos every month. Choosing the photos that mean something to you or the ones that make you feel something.

Today I thought I would continue that theme.

When I was growing up everyone owned photo albums. The pages were made from very thick paper or board with adhesive coated onto them. To stick your images in you would lift a clear piece of thin plastic, arrange your photos on the page and then place the plastic back over them.

Mum and Dad still have many of these albums with our old family photos in it. I am not even sure you can still buy these anywhere. Perhaps someone can enlighten me?

These days we have photo books. Hard or soft cover books that we get printed online. They come bound and you can add your own embellishments to them, like a photo on the cover or pretty graphics throughout the pages. You self publish. You don’t need to have connections to a book publisher or a lot of money to print multiple copies of one of your own books.

I have made several of these photo books in the past. Usually it is of a particular theme, like our holiday to Sri Lanka, and not a bunch of photos randomly put together.

Below is an example of one of our studio samples – a selection of dog portraits.

The quality can vary. Like I mentioned in last week’s article link, usually it has to do with accurately reproducing colours. I don’t like recommending any particular service as everyone’s opinion is different and your experience with a company could be totally different to mine.

Just do a google search on ”create your own photo books” and a whole list of companies will pop up. If you are in Australia don’t forget to adjust for our dollar compared to the US dollar when comparing prices as this can raise the price significantly.

A lot of the better companies allow you to download their own software on to your computer and then you can design away.

Here are a few tips on creating your very own photo books:

• Do your research on each company and check out their online reviews. Until you find a company that you are happy with, start off with creating a few smaller books with less pages. That way you don’t spend a lot of money with a poorly printed and bound book.
• It is a lot better to create books with a central theme rather than a random mix of photos.
• I am not a graphic designer but it can be easy to add too many extra graphics and other elements to the pages of your books. Keep text to a minimum and go easy on adding smiley faces, flags, stars, streamers, the list can go on. By adding too many, you take the focus away from the images.
  Having said that for some subjects, like your child’s first year, this may work.
• Don’t add to many photos onto one page. It can be tempting to place lots and lots of photos on a single page so that you get a better bang for your buck. Remember the more photos you add to a page the smaller they will be. Just use your best photos and keep your design simple. Maybe go four images per page maximum but pages with a single image stand out a lot more as does a single image that spans the full spread of the book (see the Studio Dogs example above).
• Use simple fonts.
• Use your best image for the cover.
• Print more than one and give them out as gifts.
• Let your images tell a story. Have a definite chronological order to them and end the book with a beautiful conclusion.
  Don’t know how to do this effectively? Well check out this article on making a family photo album using simple storytelling techniques. In it I go through how to tell a story with your images.

I hope this article has inspired you to create your own photo book! Leave a comment below and let me know how you went.

Until next time.
Take care

Warren