We've travelled a lot over the years both abroad and around Australia. I'm not sure how many places we've been to on vacations in the thirty two years we've been together but it's a lot. Heaps! Over those years we've also taken a lot of photos as you can imagine. Last year on our UK/Finland trip I took over 6,000 for instance. [Of course, not all of them were kept.]
Back in the day we would take the photos on a 35mm camera, wait until we retuned home, get them processed and hope they came out ok - Preview screens weren't a thing back then. Digital photography arrived, with a massive one megapixel capacity, and things changed forever; No more waiting for the shots to be processed onto photo-paper, no more hoping they'd be ok. We could take the shot, check it and re-take it if required.
These days we travel with a digital camera and our phones which, as you will know, can take amazingly good pictures these days. I've got piles of pictures processed on photo-paper taken over the years plus over 25,000 digital images on a cloud storage service which occasionally we stream to my flat panel and take a look at - We have never printed any of the digital images to date for some reason.
Never before have we created a photobook either...Until now.
I thought it would be cool to create a photobook of our New Zealand trip for my mother in-law as she is not very digital in nature; Her mobile phone is about as digital as it gets for her.
I figured it would be cool for her to have a book to take around to her friends, art and crafts group and family-members to show some photos of the trip. You may recall the NZ trip was her first overseas excursion and one designed to celebrate the fact she'd survived cancer this year after over twelve months of battling against it. Anyway, I thought it would be better than her showing a bunch of small printed images.
I did a little googling and came up with a few places who did the books, both on the interwebs and off, but decided to choose Photobook Australia as they had Australia in their title and their process seemed legit.
I chose the photos I wanted to use, a selection of every aspect of the trip from start to finish, and proceeded to lay them out into the online-draft which seemed quite easy to do - Although time-consuming.
They let you select the book size, cover type [hard or soft], paper type [matt, gloss, weight etc.] and various other layout type options which make it very easy to get started. There are also image templates to choose from however I laid out the images in my own design instead. I added a title at the beginning of each set of images as a prompt for her in case she forgot where each place was and I was done!
A few clicks and a credit card payment later and my order was placed.
They emailed me in response to my order suggesting that I could expect my book to arrive within seven days, but I was sceptical. To my pleasure six days later my book arrived, packaged really well to avoid any potential damage and a day ahead of schedule.
When creating the book I was concerned that some of the images may be a little pixelated as I selected images from my phone (Samsung S9) and my camera. I wasn't sure if a panorama shot from my phone would print properly for instance, once made larger to cover the pages of my book. I opened the package with a little trepidation and saw my book for the first time. It looked sensational!
I'd chosen a plain white theme rather than a different coloured background and I'm glad. It looks clean and crisp and leaves the images to take hero-status. I also added minimal words for the same reason. I wanted it to be a simple flick-through picture book, nothing more.
I flipped through the first few pages expecting the worst, pixelated images, but found none. The images were crisp, clear and the colours were fantastic! The images of the book above probably won't show the photo-quality very well but in real life they came out so great. We are really pleased. There's over fifty pages in the book, so loads of images, and there's not a single one that I'm not happy with as far as print quality goes.
The book cost me $77AUD delivered so $65 just for the book plus postage. I think that was a great price. Having said that the website offers 50% off the first order so it would have cost $130 plus postage usually. If I had to pay full price, like I will for my next one, it'd hurt a bit more I guess but to be honest the enjoyment my mother in-law will get out of this book is worth double that or more anyway and the same for any photobooks I do for Faith and I.
I'm not going to bore you with all the images, besides you've probably seen many of them in my posts made throughout the trip if you follow me regularly and actually bother to read my posts. If not search the tag #aussies-newzealand and you can check them out along with the associated words if you're so inclined.
Faith and I were chatting about it yesterday and are pretty keen to get a couple more books made up for some of our other trips, probably starting with our UK/Finland trip from last year. To be honest, I can see us getting a few done which will give us the chance to go through our images again, plus enjoy them more easily moving forward. We'd probably just leave them on the coffee table to flick through when we were feeling like smiling about all those awesome memories. I know many may question this considering we're in a digital world and people seem to have everything on their phone now but for me staring at a screen, phone, computer or television flat panel is not my idea of fun. Give me a book, with pages, any day.
I'd have to call my first photobook-creating experience a complete success, and myself a photobook boss, and am looking forward to getting started on the next. Don't ask me why I haven't done this before - I probably won't have much of an answer. Hmm, maybe laziness? Let's go with that. I'm hooked now though.
Design and create your ideal life, don't live it by default