Photobooks

by Drew Patchell | 29 Jan 2013

Long-gone are the days of carefully arranging your printed photos behind the plastic of the photo album and tucking it away in the cupboard. Today, photo albums still exist, but they are more like coffee-table books, with digital production allowing a whole new world of creative freedom. 

A photobook is a book containing a collection of photographs. The first photobook ever created is thought to be Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions published in 1854 by Anna Atkins to assist the scientific community in the identification of marine specimens.

While your photobook ambitions may not be as ambitious as Anna Atkins’s, you can create a photobook that tells a story from cover to cover, whether it is of a recent holiday, your grandson winning his football final or even your family history.

A modern photobook will have thick, glossy pages, often with more than one photo per page and there are plenty of software options available to help you along the way.

Creating your first photobook

1. The best photobooks have a strong theme, so identifying your book’s theme and gathering all the relevant images is the best place to start.
2. Select the best 20 photos and decide in what order to place them.
3. Scan any photos that are not digital and place them in a special folder you have created on your computer.
4. Decide how much you are willing to spend and then shop around to find a deal that suits your needs.
5. Use the selected company’s software to create your photobook and pay for it to be created. If you are not comfortable designing your own photobook at home, some stores allow you to use their computers in store with staff on hand to help out.

How much will it cost?

You can expect to pay around $30 for an A5 landscape 20-page basic photobook without any of the bells and whistles, and around $60 for a high-definition photobook including a photo on the cover.

Features to look for

Different companies will offer special features, often at an added cost. You can choose the size of your photobook, add extra pages and improve the quality of the paper. 

Many companies offer hard or soft covers, and a choice between a plain cover or a cover with a photograph printed on it. Often having a special cover will increase the cost quite a lot, but it can make your photobook look much more professional.

Getting the best results

It would be a shame to spend money on a photobook, only to be disappointed with the quality of the end product. To ensure your creation looks as good as possible, you need to make sure your photos are in the correct format.

The most important thing to check is that the resolution of your photos is 300dpi at the size you want them printed. If the resolution is lower than this, the final product will look grainy or out of focus. 

Tips

• Don’t be afraid to put one photograph on top of the other. In bigger photobooks it can look very effective to use a simple landscape photo as the page background for some smaller shots.
• Include captions. There are a few reasons, and top of the list is jogging your memory in the future. Right now the subject of your photobook is fresh in your mind, but a few years down the track it may not be. It is also a nice way to document your family history for future generations.

The Probus National Photographic Competition is closing on 31 January, with winners to be announced at a dinner in February. Get your entries in or start working on next year's, and check out the competition by visiting the Photographic Competition page.