Time Money and Light

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

One Reply to “Time Money and Light”

  1. 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.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.