Every New Year's Eve is my gentle reminder to get working on my Instagram album from the year. I intentionally get inspired to post just one more picture to end out the year for my album even if we are just sitting at home to cheer in the new year. And in just a few weeks later I have all my Instagram photos in a pretty little book.
I am pretty faithful to Blurb for my photo books. They offer great quality at a reasonable price. The only complaint I have is that uploading photos from Instagram to the book is not the highest of quality. And this isn't Blurb's fault -- it has to do with Instagram downsizing the images. As my phone photography has gotten quite a bit better, the quality of the print books has started to matter more. With each book I learn a little bit more on how to create the best book for quality.
The main thing I learned was that in the future I want to do less full size photos in the book as those tend to be the most grainy. I am going to try doing more four photo collages as well as smaller one page spreads. By smaller one page spreads, I mean that I will make the photo smaller (with a larger white border) instead of full bleed (see the photo above with border and below full bleed).
There is really no way of knowing how grainy a photo will come out so my new strategy is likely to make me a little happier with the quality of the images. I take photos with my Samsung Galaxy S5, a Fuji XE-2, as well as images from blog posts that are taken with a Nikon D600. I thought that maybe the images that are uploaded from my higher quality cameras would come out clearer but I was wrong. The photos are literally inconsistent in printing -- sometimes my phone photos come out less grainy than my SLR. So that being said -- I blame Instagram.
But nonetheless, these books are about memories and not perfection. So for a book of photos based off of a photo app, I cannot complain too much. And really I am too much of a perfectionist about my photos, and as you can see in these photos, the images aren't really bad at all.
I know there are a lot of different Instagram photo printing books out there and my guess is that a smaller book in size would have less of an issue as the pictures are printed in a smaller size. But I have been happy with Blurb's quality for many years that I don't even bother to try anything else.
So besides the technical side of the photos, I really love these Instagram books. Seeing a year in review with the little snapshots of life is so special to me. I am good about taking pictures of major events and vacations but having photos of my home, my garden, or something cute my nephews did provide such wonderful memories. Before phone photography, many of these little aspects of life were not always captured.
The back cover is always my favorite. What will be the epic photo of 2014? Most definitely this one!
Now go print those phone photos!!!
You can find me on Instagram here (domesticfash).
***Right now Blurb is running 20% off of all photo books using code: 2015BLURBMAR through 3/31/15.
