POD for real men

I was thinking, why let blurb or any other company do the printing of my book when I can do it myself.

I am considering, if anyone is interested, to make a small edition of hand made books, printed on real rag paper. I think I will limit to 5 copies, since there is very much work involved. I haven’t calculated the cost of materials yet, but off the top of my head right now I would say maybe 60-70USD in production cost. I was not planning on making profit of it, maybe just selling it 10-20$ above the cost of the material. If I decide to go for it, I will bind it in the same style as the book I made two months ago (link here).

It may be a bit more expensive than the blurb alternative, but at least it is hand made, and printed on fine art paper.

Post a comment if you’re interested. No obligations so far. I will do a better estimate on the cost, and find out if I really want to do it (lots of work, but fun).

already discovered a faulty image

It seems I made a minor miss on one of the photos, which I fixed just now. Still not one month, so I am allowed

I used a Photoshop action to add the black border and to expand the page with white so they would all be the same size, which is exactly the same size as the page. This makes it really easy to place the images. Just pop them in and let them fill the page   – done. Anyway, I redid all the images for the final version, but I forgot one. This one already had the black border and white page, and got the treatment once more. It didn’t look that good.

I was pleased that it only took me 10 minutes to export a new version of that image, prepare, link it into the document, create the pdf and publish it again. Now I really feel the Monthly folio stuff is paying off. It really has smoothed out the workflow for publishing pdfs.

SoFoBoMo is done

I finally managed to sit down today and finish up the pdf. the text is really written in a hurry, but I think it will hold up. I also think I have got at least some of the pages to hold together photographically. Anyway, one month have passed, and this is what I got.

The photos are the result of only 4 evening shoots. Probably 6-7 hours total. I kept the layout simple, which saved me a lot of time. A square book with centered images (slight bottom weight), and a small amount of text spread out.

The image processing was long and tedious for a few of the shots, and very brief for most. I did a couple of exposure blends, and two focus blends. Many of these images really need quite much post processing due to the large contrast range, but I think I have made the best out of my limited time.

So, here is a link to the pdf, mind you it is rather big (6Mb).

Right now, when I got this project of my chest, the rest of my life is calming down as well. I will probably find more time for shooting, and I will try to look through most of the other SoFoBoMo contributions. The coming week is a vacation week for me, so we’ll see what I’ll do.

Really Right Stuff just arrived

This looks very good. Still at work, so I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks and feels very solid. The L-plate fits snuggly to my camera (which I do have at work).

Looking forward to trying it out.

An the digitally enhanced version

Heavy manipulation, not at all true to the real world.

I’m talking about the black and white conversion of course

The summer is definitely coming

Just out walking with my wife when she spotted this one

first book mock up today

I helped my mother putting together some furniture today, and unhinged my back in the process. I had a vague thought of getting down to the river after the work was done, but my back put a definite end to that. Instead I have spend the evening picking pictures and putting them together. So far, I have 38 pictures, and some blank pages for text. The format will be square, the layout will be super simple, and if you would print it, I would probably end up in the range of 20×20cm to 25×25cm (8×8 to 10×10 inch).

I feel quite confident now that I will finish the book now that I already have something that qualifies. The next week will probably be spend rethinking the image selection and sequencing. And of course, writing a few words on those blank pages.