What you need to know about photo book printing.

For anyone who has some art and photography skills, now is their time to shine. As a long- time dedicated photographer and someone who grew up in the Kodachrome, darkrooms and processing labs era, photography today is wildly different and exciting.

It wasn't that many years ago that photo book printing was highly complex and enormously expensive. Today, with digital everything, extraordinary images are possible and you don't even have to go into the darkroom to make them. Even better, you can fairly easily have your own photo book printed to show off your prowess as a photographer and skilled artist.

Admittedly it is still somewhat pricey to create and have your own photo books printed, but like any similar endeavour, you need to make the best of your experience and your investment. More than many other types of self published books, those wanting to publish their own photo books need to have a clear vision of why they are producing a photo book and what they will be doing with it.

The first thing I ask anyone who is thinking of photo book printing is, what do you want to create this photo book for?  You would be surprised at the answers I get. Some people tell me they want to produce photo books for the retail market, that is, they want to sell them at book stores, Amazon and where ever they can. Others simply want to make a few books as Christmas presents of for some other special occasion. Others have even wanted to make photo books so they can use them to get a job in the photography or graphics business.

All of these are great reasons for photo book printing, so making sure you have the very best images and the highest quality you can muster will be very important. Every photo book, even if it is a B&W book will NEED to be printed on a color machine. This differs from manuscript produced books which can be printed on B&W printing machines. To produce the detail you will need, whether it is B&W or color images in your book, it will need to be printed on a color printer which is many times the price of simple B&W text printing.

The best approach we have seen is the working backwards method. That is figuring out what your budget for your first printing will be, and from that the number of books you will want to produce. With this information you will quickly be able to figure out how many pages the book will contain and from that how many quality images you will need.

Most photographers tell me that it will be “easy” to pick out number of pictures they will need for their book. Then I tell them, you can't just pick out pictures willy-nilly, the pictures need to have some sort of continuity. Remember that you are producing a book, so although the pictures need to do justice to the book they also need to tell some sort of a story, otherwise, what's the point?

Invariably those photographers who thought they had lots of pictures for their book often end up struggling to decide which pictures should go in and which should not. Sometimes some of what they thought was their best works, simply do not fit in the context of the book.

Photo book printing is probably one of the most thrilling ventures you will undertake. It is exciting, rewarding and energizing but it does take time and patience. Know in advance your purpose and what you, the photographer want to get out of the exercise and set your sites on achieving that. Armed with that information ... dig in and start planning your own photo book.

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