What If You Could Shoot Like a Pro—With the Camera in Your Pocket?
/Think you need a dSLR or just tired of dragging one around all the time? Learn to shoot like a pro with the camera in your pocket—your iPhone!
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Think you need a dSLR or just tired of dragging one around all the time? Learn to shoot like a pro with the camera in your pocket—your iPhone!
Read More*** This post has been updated to make it even more awesome! *** Let's be real.
I appreciate scrap booked labors of love as much as the next gal, but honestly, if my future (yet-to-be-conceived) children are to have any chance of having their memories live on in an analog format, I can't carry on with the fantasy that someday I'll make scrap booking a regular part of my life. Maybe for a special gift, but definitely not a monthly/yearly thing.
Thankfully, I found a painless alternative.
I've been stewing about how I can make it easy to make sure that our family memories (and bits of daily life) have a life beyond a dusty ol' pile of hard drives.
(This is one of my favorite What the Duck comic strips by the genius Aaron Johnson)
I generally recommend that each time you download photos (whether from your phone, or your "real camera"), pick your 10-20 favorites and order some prints. When they come, just drop them in a photo storage box. Getting fancy with glue and scissors is nice, but totally not required.
Of course, if you're like me, as diligent as I am with taking care of client images, when it comes to my own personal photos—I'm lucky if I download them 3 or 4 times per year. In fact, I've gotten to the point where—like lots of folks—most of the time, the only camera I have with me is my phone.
And the most action my personal photos ever see is if they happen to get posted online via Instagram, etc. So it made the most sense to find a way to make a book from my Instagram images.
And since sifting through my entire photo collection in search of the images I happened to post to Instagram is not likely to happen (like trying to find a needle in a haystack), I was on a mission to find a better way.
Enter Blurb. There are a lot of book-making solutions out there (especially when it comes to Instagram and other social photo sharing sites), but many leave much to be desired in terms of design flexibility, ease of use, and product quality.
Having been a Blurb fan for years, I already knew that I wanted them to print my books, but the online tool they provide for printing your Instagram images has some sort of bug that jumbles the images out of order if you try to add more than the default of 52. And since I was planning to include roughly 250 images, this was a serious concern. (This is really too bad, as otherwise this tool would be so great!)
Blurb also makes a book plug-in for Lightroom, but after playing around with it for awhile, though the interior page layout options had what I wanted (a single square image per page), I found the cover layout and material options to be limiting (compared to the choices Blurb offers elsewhere) and ultimately I wasn't able to cobble together the book in the specific way I wanted. So, I turned my attention back to Blurb's free desktop application (called BookSmart).
Here's the Step-by-Step
I wanted a single image per page with plenty of white space around it, so I wrote a Photoshop action to build out each 4x4 image with a nice white background to fill out a 7x7 page. You can write your own, or download my custom action here (for a 7x7 book). Then batch run the action on the whole folder via Bridge.
Enjoy!
PS: Save 20% on your Blurb books through Dec. 8th with the code ANY20
As much as I love Apple, I do not love managing/downloading my photos with iTunes or iPhoto. But—I also don't want 3 years worth of images bogging down my phone. What's a girl to do? Turns out, Mac users can easily bypass iTunes by using Preview. Just plug in your phone, launch Preview, and choose File>Import from iPhone.
Once the images are downloaded, you can also use Preview to batch delete photos from your iPhone. Pretty sweet, eh?
Now that you have tons more space for tons more photos, get out there and get to it already! :)
PS: Looking for more photo fun? Check out my post on how to give your mobile photos a life beyond Instagram and Facebook.
PSS: Windows user? Check out this great post made just for you!
Khara Plicanic. Instructor, Photographer, Designer, Advocate. Here you'll find tools, inspiration, and empowerment to help you on your own creative journey.