Printing a book with photos and text

Lyaiera

For a college assignment I'm keeping a diary of all my photography thoughts. This is everything from my thoughts on famous photographer's work, other photographers, my own work, my approach to my work, my struggles and triumphs, etc.

A lot of people who've done this assignment before went crafty and made their own book, handwritten and pasting pages into big art books. I was thinking of going the other way and getting a book printed up with my writing and photos in it.

It's the start of the year so I've only about 25 or so pages written up, but I need to know if this is feasible before I commit to it. I'm imagining it will be expensive, but how expensive is the real question. If I keep this as a memory of my photographic development over a year it could be worth putting a few quid into it.

The problem is the only places I've seen that do the right formats, and quality of book have minimum print runs, or are extremely expensive. I was looking at Lulu, which seems a lot cheaper but that's for publishing and you need an ISBN. This isn't for publishing, it's for an assignment/exam.

Does anyone have any advice about printing it up?

flyingsnail

Photobox will allow you to print an single book and A3 size book will cost about 100-200 depending on your number of pages and quality options. The print quality is pretty good but in my experience it is worth the extra for the heavier quality paper. The problem is I think they limit you to 100 pages in A3 (120 A4??)
Blurb will also allow you to print a single copy, I had a look and a large (not quite A3) book with 240 pages would be about €250 (that’s with premium paper), they do allow up to 440 pages but only with standard paper.

Now a few other things to consider, if you are going to be including samples and examples of other peoples work into your personal development are you going to be able to get them in sufficient quality so that they look good in print, I think a blocky low res image could bring down the quality of what you are trying to achieve.

Are you going to want to include things like darkroom experiments, film strips, ect. The good handmade projects like you describe that I have seen are able to include these along with large prints (assuming you want to include large prints)

How do you intend to put the book together, I have used light room in the past to compile photobooks for printing but they were just photobooks with minimal text, Lightroom does not really handle large amounts of text well. So you will probably need to decide early on what company you are going to go with and look at what programs and file types they accept. You don’t want to reach the end of the year and find that you project is stored in a format that the printer won’t accept or that is not easily transcribed into a format that they do accept.

TomCo

Why not just go to one of those shops that do printing and binding for theses, like the thesis centre?

pixbyjohn

Do it with Aldi, cheap and cheerful and very good quality.
http://www.aldiphotos.ie/photobooks/
Approx 7 day turnaround. I have used them for parties, christenings etc.

Myksyk

I'd recommend Blurb. I have a 220 page book from them containing hundreds of photos and as much text as I want. Very impressed with quality. Cost about €180 as I recall.