Dear Reader,
First to Keith’s comments of yesterday, and the term of the day from a work discussion that is applicable to the transient nature of digital images. The term is “termporal validity”. Photos have always had an element of time in their DNA. A challenge of digital media is that they lack tactility. Furthermore, we are so inundated with noise of all sorts, most media has a very short temporal validity. A book is tactile and as Keith wrote yesterday a book has prescence over time. In other words, a book has longer temporal validity. Furthermore, a book has structure, conversations and relationships that exist among photos, and across pages. I can return to a book. It is true, I can return to a digital image, but the digital return only engages a single sense.
Once upon a time I was a techie. I could write batch files in DOS and in multiple flavours of Unix. I could make the tools do what I thought I wanted. Now, my approach is much simpler – I just want the damn thing to work at a price I am willing to pay. I couldn’t justify the cost of a nice printer. Instead I bought a cheap printer. The cost of the ink nearly forced the cats into starvation. The printer is gone and the cats are happy. If I need to print a batch of photos, as part of a workflow, I use Costco. Up to now I have only printed 4 x 6. Printing 5 x 7 as part of “seeing what works” is a new element.
The penultimate topic of the day is price. I use Blurb.ca and they frequently have sales. The discount is often but not always 40% off the list price of the book. In the case of the most recent book it had 2 versions. The first version was a paperback version on a premium paper I like. I wanted to to see if the flow was correct and if some photos needed lightening.
Details for the softcover prototype
- Number of pages – 56
- Number of photos – appoximately 75 photos, 5 of those pages contain a combined total of 24 of those images
- Size of pages 9.5″ x 8″
- Cost book 39.39, gst 1.78, S&H 11.99, 40% off 39.39 -15.76
- Total 37.40
Details for the hardcover are as above
- Cost book 53.59, gst 2.21, S&H 11.99, 40% off 53.59 -21.44
- Total 46.35
Total for the project is less than 85.00 and I leave it to you to compare that to the wonderful work done by Resolve.
One last thing before I go. I took a minor detour on the way home from work today and took this hand-held panorama.
Cheers, Sean
Thank you! I took a quick look at Blurb; I hadn’t known of them. One of my buddies buys printers, and when the ink runs out he scraps it at the e-recycle place and buys a new one because of the price of ink. Once upon a time I started making a chart comparing the price of gasoline, milk, and printer ink as sold in the refill cartridges. I was going to include the difficulty of sourcing raw materials, transportation, manufacturing considerations, and whatever else I discovered along the way. It didn’t take long to understand that gasoline is one of the great bargains of our time, and I never actually finished the project. Maybe now that I’m retired…
One of the articles I read some months back, while mainly thought relevant to pro photographers, suddenly came to mind. They were discussing how to show their work to a potential client. People argued the merits of going to a coffee shop and using an iPad or it’s ilk, or a laptop, or forcing the clients to come to your studio to see your work on the big screen, or pointing them to a website they could view on their device of choice. None of them mentioned a book.