I’m hoping that you’ve had a wonderful bank holiday weekend whether it was filled with new memories of days out or some time at home with family and friends. We headed south to the beautiful Symonds Yat, close to Monmouth on the Welsh borders. If you’ve never been I can’t recommend it enough – an area of outstanding natural beauty with some easy but wonderful walks and cycle trails to follow. I tried not to take too many photos and partly succeeded as mountain biking with a big camera is a bit tricky!
Weekends like this remind me of the importance of printing out our images, whether they’re from a phone camera or a professional shoot. We were celebrating a range of milestones this weekend (an all too big birthday for me later this year, a big birthday for my Dad and my brother and his fiancée’s engagement) and I’m determined to ensure that the shots we all took end up in print somewhere!
A couple of clients have asked me who I’d recommend for photobooks and so I thought it might be helpful if I put together a list based on my experience and that of other photographers I’m connected to. It’s worth saying that some companies work directly with professional photographers but all of my recommendations are open to you.
So here are some of my recommended photobooks …
These two are similar price points (around £20-£25 for 20 pages A4 landscape book). They both have a wide range of paper types and sizes ranging from 18cm square books right through to large coffee table style. Blurb requires you to download software to design your book whereas Bob Books will let you work from their online site and can be used on mobile devices. What I really love about Blurb is the ability to mix lots of text into your images – we turned our travel blog into a 200 page book with plenty of images and text. Both Blurb and Bob Books have lots of lovely templates to help you with your design.
The best of the rest…
I’ve used all of these companies for photo books for my own images in the past. They’re all good quality and perfect if you want to print large numbers of pages or create books regularly as their costs are much more affordable. It’s worth checking for voucher codes and offers; Colorland often have amazing offers on Groupon and there are currently Easter offers (ending soon) on the other sites of up to 50% discount. These discounts mean you can get a 26 page A4 photobook for between £15-20. All of these sites offer online editors and plenty of templates. You still get great flexibility in design and for large volumes of images the auto-fill features are really handy.
I hope you found this piece helpful. I’m likely to offer a service later this year to pull together photobooks of images from my shoots so do let me know if you’re interested in having your shots in a coffee table style album. Some of the companies listed above will offer a high end product line. If you’re interested in the types of products a photographer can deliver for you then have a look at these sites…
Whatever you decide to do and however you decide to do it – I can’t recommend printing your images enough!