People have been telling me that I should go Blurb myself for some time now, and round July of last year I finally made up my mind to do just that. Took a while, but I finally got round to making 40 odd scans from silver negs and putting the whole damn thing together. So what's it like getting Blurbed?
Like everyone, when it comes to Blurb, I've seen some great books, and those anything but (content and quality wise)- the vast majority in color. I received my first copy of Small Rewards this week and just sent back the tweeked version which I then made "public." The first version was very... promising; the glossy cover looked great, and most of the B&W reproductions on the inside looked- OK. Some needed very obvious tweeking, but my worst fears were negated- for $30 bucks you can get a reasonable representation of your work in book format. And that aint bad!
Forget about deep, rich, sensuous blacks and endless gradations- it's caveman B&W, but it gets the job done. Good news, highlights don't get blown out- but as for deeper tonal values and shadows, well.... all my tweeking was to open up shadow areas, and add contrast. Reproductions run towards the dark side, so scans should be a tad lighter (and choose the deluxe paper). That said, I'm sure someone more Photoshop savvy than I, with a calibrated monitor, etc, etc could no doubt get more refined images out of it. But I can only speak of my own admittedly primitive experience. And while I initially wanted to print one photo per two pages, that turned out to be cost prohibitive. The resulting soft cover 40 page "book" is so thin, it's as much pamphlet as book, and they're not gonna go flying off the virtual shelves and make ya rich (even if you tack on an add. one or two bucks for yourself in the price)- but again, for $30 bucks (incl ship) you got something representative in a very portable (in this case, 8X10 in) book format.
You can preview the book on the link above or through the book link on the right hand side, and I'll be removing my old, down and dirty Pet Cemetery scans from Flickr and gradually replacing them with the new and improved versions which I'll also be posting here, probably in groups of five...
BTW-- The SX-70 color photo is the only color photo in the book- and it's on the back cover only... All other photos, Nikons and Tri-X w/20mm and 16mm Nikkors.
5 comments:
Yeah Stan!!
Awesome!!
Not quite the word I'd use, but thank you...
PS- OK,OK... in the interest of full disclosure- yes, it's true- she's my sister-in-law!
Well done stan! Looks good, as soon as my redundancy comes through I'll be buying.
I take it that's what we yanks call "unemployment insurance?"
Save your pounds, Mark, that's what these free internets are for. You can pick one up when you celebrate your new job!
congrats! and a million thanks for insight into the process of "blurb"...btw alien skin software has some very refined adjustments for shadow detail recovery. better than PShop imo.
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