Although I'm an inveterate proponent of on-line photographic galleries and websites, there's a certain frisson that runs down my spine when seeing my images in print and/or in book form. This is most probably in common with the majority -if not all- photographers.
So it was with this frisson that i started to view my latest photo book titles "The Old Qi Bao Teahouse".
It's self published using Blurb and it's now available for sale in hard cover format and as a PDF.
For fuller background on the Qi Bao teahouse, I've published a gallery with explanatory text and monochromatic photographs here, as well as an audio-photo slideshow on Vimeo which includes ambient sound and a clip of a pingtan performance.
I chose an Image Wrap hard cover to give it heft and "gravitas"...and opted for the large format landscape format 13x11 inches (33x28 cm), with 56 lustre finish pages and using Blurb's ProLine Charcoal End Sheets Premium Paper. I used Blurb's proprietary software called Bookwright to produce the book's front and back covers, and its pages. Here are some of the screen grabs:
As for the processing of the photographs that were mostly made using the medium format Fuji GFX50R + 45mm 2.8mm, I used Iridient Developer and Silver Efex Pro2. For the pages that required Chinese characters, I used Adobe Photoshop and downloaded the special Chinese font called Yengenyou.
Since Blurb only allows either JPEG or PNG, I preferred to use the latter as it's a lossless format. With all my photographs being horizontals, I reduced their size from 8256 x 6192 to 4500 x 3375 pixels and kept their resolution at 300 dpi resulting in file sizes of 10Mb or thereabouts. The color profile is sRGB IEC61966-2.1.
