After a family holiday to Holland a couple of years ago, we had a photo book printed by Blurb. I took a lot of photos on the three-week trip, and wanted to have a hard-copy photo book for myself, and for my parents and siblings who holidayed with us.

Blurb are a well-renowned print-on-demand company, and they offer numerous book printing options, with a variety of paper types, book bindings and other options. Blurb provide multiple options for creating books, allowing you to use either their BookSmart software, web-based Bookify, a plug-in for Adobe InDesign, or you can do your own thing and create a PDF file for printing as a book.

This photo book was in Blurb's large landscape size (13x11 inches, or 33x28 cm), and was created using Blurb's BookSmart software. When we had it printed by Blurb, we specified it with an imagewrap hard cover, ProLine black end sheets, premium lustre paper. These options increased the cost of the book, but I think it was worth the additional cost.

showing the spine, cover and binding of the book

We are very happy with the resulting book from our recent experience with Blurb. However, there are a few things I wish I had known before undertaking this project, as it would have saved me some time and effort.

Here are a few of the things I learnt from my experiences in preparing my first photo book using Blurb's BookSmart software.

I love the red, orange and yellow colours of the autumn leaves. Today, the first day of winter, I was pruning a tree in our back yard with two of my children, and when I saw these back-lit leaves on our Chinese Tallowtree, I had to stop and grab my camera.

backlit autumn leaves

Chinese Tallowtree (Triadica Sebifera)

back yard at home, Western Australia
Canon EOS 50D, 35mm f/2 @35mm, 1/400 sec, f/8, ISO100