Swiftcurrent Reflections

Just over a week ago, Meg and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary. As it is the “paper” anniversary, I wanted to do something cool to celebrate that. With that in mind, I decided to create a photo book of our first year as a married couple. I hadn’t created any photo books up to this point, so I hit Google and did some searching. My requirements were:

• No minimum order (I only wanted to print one for now)
• Great photo reproduction
• Not too expensive

After looking at the options, I decided to go with the Photo Book from Adorama. They basically print everything out on Fuji Crystal Archive paper, just like getting prints from Costco, then bind it. Their binding is pretty neat, as each page will open flat, so you can have an image cross the page fold. Great for panoramas.

Their creation tool is flash based and completely online. It was great and not-so-great. The tool itself worked well. I was able to upload over 350 full-res photos with no problem, then place them on the page, scale, position, and add type without many limits. The only issue was that being web-based, there was always just a little delay in things. Also, to get things lined up exactly at the pixel level took a bit of time. If I were to do this again (and I do think I’ll make a year two book next year), I think I would create large images in Photoshop for each page correctly sized for the book size I’m using, edit things in Lightroom, then place the Lightroom images onto the page in Photoshop. Then just upload the 50 (or whatever) pages and be done. That would give more flexibility, but wouldn’t allow me to do changes from any browser.

The quality is great. Adorama has a color profile for their process, and that was used. Cost really isn’t that bad. The 50-page 8×12 album I got was (don’t look Meg) $77.88. That works out to a per 8×12 cost of $1.56. The Costco (my go-to place for almost all printing) is only $1.49 for a single 8×12. That means for $0.07 a page, Adorama is binding it into a book. I’d call that a steal.

The only other bad thing is shipping. When you go to check out, selecting 2-day or next-day shipping says “in before 1:30PM M-F shipped the same day”. Great, I said, and ordered the 2-day shipping. After a couple days, my order still said processing, so I contacted their support. They said, “Your photobook order is in processing at the moment. Please note that it is a 5 – 7 business day turn around for books no matter what shipping option is chosen.” Keep that in mind…

Here are a couple pictures of the book I made. I just got a bevy of LED key chain lights, so you also to see some of my first “Painting with Light” pictures: