I want to report on two new discoveries I’ve made recently that other photographers may be interested in knowing about. Firstly, the “Hoodman Loupe” is a lightweight loupe that you wear around your neck. By placing it over your LCD it covers the entire screen, blocks out the light and magnifies your image (turn the eyepiece to adjust) so you can more easily view the photo you just took. This is especially helpful on bright sunny days, when you to need view your photo for composition and to ensure you got what you wanted in focus. I don’t think you’d be able to tell if you truly got everything in focus unless you actually zoomed in on the areas you wanted to check, but this is great to use when you’ve taken a group shot and want to make sure everyone has their eyes open. I think you can rely on this pretty well to check for general composition and focus. I just got mine and used it outside while shooting macros and it helped me so much. I realize that most people don’t have a problem viewing images on their LCD screens because it’s already large enough, but if you’re like me and you own a 5 year old Canon 20D (with a tiny LCD screen) that you’d love to upgrade but just don’t have the money yet, then this is your $80 answer. I picked mine up at George’s Camera, although you can also order it online from B&H Photo and Adorama.
Secondly, I must share this awesome photo book publishing website I just discovered, called Blurb. I’ve had such fun browsing the hundreds of different photo books that are for sale. It’s only been up until pretty recently that photographers, writers, and artists have been able to offer up a published book that they can sell one at a time without having to pour thousands of dollars (or finding a sponsor/investor) to print a huge batch of books to sell. The prices are very reasonable, you get to set your own price, and you get to keep 100% of the mark up. You can also offer a soft cover version of your book for an even cheaper price than the hardcover. I have been playing with their Booksmart Software and am happy to report the possibilities are endless. You can play with any aspect ratio you want, add text, and vary the sizes of everything on each page. They have different themes and formats that can help guide you as you are laying out your book but you can do whatever you want with your format. You can also use the design sofware of your choice if you like and then upload it as a PDF. The world is your oyster!
I’m also extremely impressed with the diversity of the bodies of work out there by other photographers. There is just so much talent out there and every single book I viewed was offering up a very unique view of the world, making me want to celebrate the art of photography and all the photographers that exist in the world. Simply amazing! Look at their site to see for yourself. Browse their bookstore to look at their Photography Now Competition and Staff Picks to see the standouts. Some of my favorites: A Dog and His Girl, Pixel Nation, Foreclosure USA, The Duration of Things, REAL, Untold Stories, Cameraphone, and Reflections.
I confess I have yet to make my own wedding album. It’s one of those projects I keep meaning to get to and now it’s been five and half years. Where does the time go? I vow to get this done before the year is up! Using this software will make it easy for me to put the images together to tell our story and lay it out how I want. I know this will make the hubby very, very happy. It will be a fun project for me as I relive my wedding day too. I think one of the reasons I haven’t gotten it done is because I had big plans to manually put everything together in a scrapbook and well, scrapbooking just isn’t my cup of tea! I really wanted to be into scrapbooking, but for that reason, I think I’ve been avoiding that task like the plague.
Lastly, my plan is to publish my Imagining Wonderland photo book and offer it up for sale on Blurb, so it’s been an incredible resource to be able to view other books to get ideas for what I want to do with my project. I’ve browsed hundreds and have found very few that actually contain creative writing or a short story that goes along with the photography, so I guess I’m going to have to just wing it and see what I think looks good for my idea.
Anyway, the Hoodman Loupe and Blurb website are two things that I’ve recently been very excited about, so I just had to blog about them. Maybe it will turn out that I’m the only one that excited about them, but that’s ok too.