A service with the requisite Gen Y silly name – is it any good?

That exemplar of street photographers, Juan Buhler mentioned in an email that his latest book of snaps was published using a web publisher named Blurb. He finds the quality superior to Lulu, which I used for my first book which was all monochrome. With the first book I uploaded a PDF file, created in MS Word (the bad old days before Apple’s Pages came along), to Lulu, and sure enough, what you see is what you get with this approach.

Blurb, by contrast, delivers an application named BookSmart to you by download and you use it to compose your book. There’s a broad selection of handy templates and while the whole thing is not especially fast, it more than suffices for composing a picture book. As my second book will be all color, I was intrigued to see what Blurb had to offer. Best of all, Blurb offers the option of a hardcover – the only way to go if you value longevity.

First, the software requires that files uploaded be 3000 x 2400 pixels, or thereabouts, to preserve quality. Make them smaller and your picture will show a large exclamation mark indicating the quality is insufficient for reproduction on paper. Given that all my high quality original pictures reside in the Aperture database, I wasn’t about to export them one by one (I’m aiming for 50 or so in the new book), as Aperture is as slow exporting pictures as it is in preparing them for printing – meaning dead slow. So instead I created a custom export profile for my pictures of choice which I highlighted in Aperture using Command-Click, thus allowing selection of non-contiguous originals. Here’s how the export preset screen looks in Aperture:

Note that I have set the Image Quality slider to maximum – twelve on the scale. DPI is set to 300 (not the more common 72 which is fine for screen display, inadequate for printing), as this is the density at which Blurb prints. Hence the large file sizes.

Here’s the export about to commence – the destination folder shows ‘Desktop’ but in practice I make a new folder and export there, to keep clutter down.

Thirty minutes later and there are 50 pictures in my book folder on the iMac (I cannot advise on PC use as I refuse to have a Microsoft paperweight in our home), with sizes ranging from 3-11 mB; some are from film, some from RAW files, so the file sizes are all over the place. These picture files are then imported into Blurb – another ten minutes or so, and after a bit of experimentation with the cover design, here’s what you see:

Pictures marked with a green check mark in the inventory tray at left are those which have been dragged and dropped into the book itself. Rearranging the pictures is a drag-and-drop affair and you can print one or two sided. I’m going to try both and will report back on how things look – I found with my first book that a draft print makes a lot of sense as it’s really the only way to determine if the book feels right from a layout and content point of view. I’m settling on an 11″ x 8.5″ landscape format with hard covers.

Narrative is easily added, but I keep it to a minimum. After all, this is a picture book, not a novel.

Time to do all this from start of export from Aperture to completion of upload to Blurb followed by the related formatting? 5 hours. This would be less on a second attempt, as there should be no learning curve. Blurb saves your uploaded pictures on the fly so if you lock up (I did, once) nothing is lost. Nice.

When composition is complete, the product must be uploaded using a broadband connection to Blurb. Here’s the Blurb upload in progress – it took 18 minutes on my so-so cable broadband connection. Not bad.

Overall I have found the BookSmart application provided by Blurb to be easy to use and reasonably flexible, providing many useful templates (techies can upload their own designs). The program slows down from time to time but simply exiting and restarting the application seems to solve the problem on my G5 iMac.

More when I get the first draft back. Meanwhile you can see the book at Blurb, together with a Book Preview, by clicking here. Don’t order it, please, as this is a draft proof to permit review and editing. Blurb automatically creates a Book Preview – click to see the first fifteen pages.

Update: You can read my comments on the first draft here.

The monopod wins for cost-benefit every time

A recent discussion with a friend somehow made its way around to monopods.

“My dear chap”, quoth I, “the single greatest bargain in the photographic world is the Manfrotto/Bogen Monopod. $30 and it’s yours.”

My buddy, a technical sort, felt it necessary to check my ramblings, and came up with this on the estimable B&H web site:

OK, so the price has gone up since I bought mine 15 years ago (a modest annual inflation rate of 2.3%), but the device remains unchanged. It has only three sections, cam locks and a screw top head. You provide the ball and socket head of your choice. It always rides in the trunk of my car, outfitted with a Leitz head and a Manfrotto QR plate – the easier it is to use the more likely it is to be used. If the cam locks loosen, as happened with mine, a metric socket and a few seconds of work allows the lock nuts to be snugged up and function restored.

So does it make a difference?

Nothing like an academic test. Here’s the target I used – a charming book titled “Cakes and Ale – The Golden Age of English Feasting”; just the thing for one who denies the bad reputation of English cooking and likes nothing so much as a good Shepherd’s Pie. Or Fish and Chips.

To make things fair I used manual exposure – ISO 160 resulted in 1/8th (good for blur!) at f/5.6 (good for definition). The lens was a non-IS 50mm Canon EF f/1.4, which I know to be superb. In each case – hand held, monopod, tripod – I took three snaps.

The enlargement is 15.8x, meaning a (rounded) 120″ x 80″ (yes, you read that right) print from a 1″ x 1.5″ original.

Here’s an enlargement of the hand held one, best of three:

Not so good, and really not usable.

Here’s the best of three on the monopod:

A whole lot better – marginaly usable in an 18″ x 24″ big print – one sixth the size of what you see here for the full frame.

Now here’s the tripod version – any one of three is the same:

So I learned a couple of lessons from this quick experiment:

• A monopod makes a huge difference (though I already knew that)
• A tripod – a really good one with a braced column – is the only way to go (I got my dream Linhof 20 years ago)
• You can’t hold a 50mm lens steady at 1/8 second
• Taking three pictures with a monopod rather than one makes a significant difference to your chances of success – the best was way better than the worst. Now that was a real surprise.

The tripod used was a braced center column, alloy Linhof model from the 1970s going by the moniker of S168 (the maximum height, column retracted, in centimetres, or 5′ 6″). I used a Novoflex magic ball head with a Manfrotto QR plate and released the shutter by hand. Delayed action, mirror lock-up and a cable release would all likely help matters.

Those lusting after a Canon 5D should note the absence of grain above ….

And here’s what that Manfrotto monopod delivers in the real world:

Hearst Castle from one mile away, Canon 5D, Leitz Telyt 400 mm, Manfrotto 3016 monopod and QR plate, Leitz B&S head

Will this ever end?

Having made the thirty framed prints for my one man show in April, it remained to make another twenty or so for unmounted display in the saw horses provided by the gallery.

A day of cranking away on the Hewlett Packard DesignJet printer and the content was ready.

So, yet another big box of mounts and mats arrives from the fine folks at Documounts, and out comes the sharp knife for trimming the mounting tissue to size, the press for mounting the prints, the glassine bags for storing the completed ‘sandwich’ and before you know it the place looks pretty much shot:

I had the idea of attaching a Certificate of Authenticity to each print as these are limited to 25 each, and it looks like this:

So that means messing about with spray-on glue and the attendant isssues that poses – mostly trying not to pass out from the awful smell of the stuff.

I mention all of this because if you think making a Book is tough, you should try having your own show of Really Large Prints. And yes, ever willing to participate in the pretentiousness of others, all my prints are dutifully described as Giclée in the accompanying brochure.