It’s here! It’s here!

My PhotoBook Creator is here!

Fair warning: Another long post everyone…

Back in October, I did the photography for my friend’s wedding. Admittedly, I’m not a particularly experienced or knowledgeable photographer (yet), but I do have a good camera (Nikon D50), a decent eye, and I take a sh*t-ton of photos that make up for it.

I got extremely lucky with a beautiful fall day and an exceptionally hansom couple to shoot, and I ended up with nearly 700 photos. Now the question becomes what to do with them. I’ve already created a DVD slideshow for them to view the photos, and we’ve got through our first round of sorting them down. Digital is nice, but when it comes to a wedding album, that needs to be printed.

I investigated photobook creation services, and decided on Picaboo because they offer downloadable software in which to create your pages. (It would take forever to upload and work with my high-res photos.) I added the first batch of photos (the prettiest outdoor shots) and realized I had a book with over 100 pages, so I decided to investigate how much it would cost. At $29.95 for the first 20 pages, and $1.99/each additional page, you can see how this would get pretty expensive, pretty quickly. Another thing to consider was the size. The book is only 8.5″ x 11″, which I personally think is too small for a wedding album. 12″ x 12″ books start at around $55 through another service.

I figured it was time to a) pare down the number of photos, and b) contact the bride to discuss budget. (More later on the wedding book saga.)

Another option I investigated is binding my own book. I didn’t want that spiral binding, so I did a search and came up with thermal binding, and the PhotoBook Creator. At $130 from Target (with 6 covers - the best deal amongst the retailers), it took me a week to decide I really wanted it.

Essentially, a heating element in the binding machine heats the glue applied to the inside spine of the book cover. You insert your printed pages into the cover and after the adhesive is heated and cooled, you have a book. Neat, huh?

Anyway, it arrived today, so I’m off to print some photos. (Don’t bother with the Collage Creator software that comes with it. I checked it out for about 3 minutes before I uninstalled it.) I’m going to use PhotoShop/InDesign cuz I’m an elitist techy smarta** (and it really is the best if you know how to use it). But no worries if you’re not down with the Adobe stuff - try that Picaboo software. It’s actually pretty cool and easy. In fact, I’m going to try printing from it first!

February 19, 2007 at 6:46 pm | Scrapbooking