Check out my new E-book on trees! Please find it in the E-Book section here.
E-book version created with Lightroom's Book Module. 109 pages. $5. Click on the image to go to the E-Book product page.
As we photographers age, the question of our photographic legacy becomes more pressing. What will happen to our stored images after we are gone? Will they ever be seen? Who would take the time to look through thousands of negatives and slides and digitize any selected to make them useful in our digital world?
Some family members might want to keep one or two of our printed photos. However, our larger, framed photos require wall space (which few people have), while the loose photos require the expense of framing or a container and space to store them. It seems most likely our precious personal photo archives will be discarded.
If our images were in books, it may be a different story. People tend to keep books and photo albums, which are more compact and have preselected content. So, how can we, as photographers, preserve our images by making books of them?
The first step is gathering the images you want in your book. The second step is finding a design program that facilitates formatting the book's pages—the arrangement of images, titles, and captions on a page and the sequencing of the pages. Then, the book needs to be printed.
Printing a book on a commercial offset press is expensive. Hundreds (usually thousands) of books must be printed before the unit cost becomes reasonable. Most of us don't have thousands of family members clamoring for our books, so we would have to try to sell the extra copies to others or store them if that fails.
Printing one book at a time is a better option for most of us, and several companies now offer that service. One company I have used is Blurb. They use a different printer than an offset press, but the quality is excellent, and they are affordable. Blurb's layout program is incorporated into Lightroom's book module, which allows you to make PDFs (E-Books) or order books directly from Blurb. There are several good YouTube videos on how to use the book module in Lightroom. Here is one I liked.
Recently. I put together a book on the subject of trees. I created an E-Book version and a printed Blurb book for my grandson. The process was straightforward, the print quality and detail were comparable to an offset press, and my 109-page, 10x8-inch hardcover book cost less than $70. Now, I have an E-Book for the website and a printed book for my grandson with stories and photographs from his grandparents.
I am sure I will do more.
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