adventures of a New York wanderer | the book

I'm one of those people who doesn't usually print their photos. I scrap with them, I view them on my laptop and I even blog about them, but I very rarely print them. However, following my recent NYC trip, I knew I wanted to create a photobook as a way of "showcasing" some of my favourite images ...

I used blurb.co.uk to create my book (I'd used them once before for photos from my friend's wedding in Italy in 2011). Blurb's software is really easy to use and you work "off-line" until you're ready to order the book, which meant I could fiddle with the font and the position of my images without having to have Internet connection (i.e. during my lunch-breaks at work).

Now I have to confess. I have a terrible time visualising sizes. I always have and I always will. When I created the wedding photo book, I did it in the small square size of 7in x 7in and whilst I was happy enough with the end result, the book felt a bit small in my hands. So this time, I opted for the large landscape size of 13in x 11in ... that's about the same size as my laptop. Wow!

As with most things, it's the preparation that takes the longest time; selecting which images I wanted to use, tweaking them to correct imperfections, cropping and saving them took several hours (over a period of about 4 days).

My next challenge was picking the style of my book. I knew I didn't really want any text / journaling. I just wanted the focus to be on the images, with a single line indicating the "when" and "where" kind of data ...

I decided to keep it very clean and simple with most pages (42 in total) having just 1 central image. There were a couple of exceptions though. As you can imagine, I took a LOT of images whilst visiting the Empire State building and I wanted to show the views looking north, south, east and west ...

I also wanted to include some of the photos captured on my mobile phone and knowing that these images wouldn't stand up to being enlarged, I opted for a multi-image page that meant keeping them neat and small ...

I ordered 2 copies, one for me and the other as a Christmas gift for Hazel (she doesn't read my blog so it's OK for me to share here) and they arrived yesterday. The quality of the books, the paper, dust cover and bindings etc is excellent. Mind you, they weren't cheap and even with a 20% discount coupon, the books worked out at approximately £45 each! A wee bit pricey, but I'm delighted with the end result. I just hope Hazel feels the same way when she opens hers on Christmas morning.