Blurb book is ordered

I ordered our Blurb book tonight. They said to expect it to ship in 5-6 business days. We ordered the book with premium paper, printed cover, and 112 total pages for about 65% of the cost of the iPhoto book (68 pages, no paper options, no printed cover option, only a slip jacket).

So, all said and done, if the quality is comparable on both books, Blurb looks like the much better deal. I've got high hopes for Apple quality though.

Tomorrow night its back to photography and on to Cindy Lou and Rob's Wedding.

iPhoto book has shipped

I received an email from Apple today. The book that we created via iPhoto has already shipped. I'm impressed with the production time. The order was placed on the 12th at night and shipped on the 15th in the morning? 68 pages?

I hope the quality is on par with the service, but like I mentioned earlier, Apple makes you pay a premium for their books. With what this book cost, I expect excellent quality.

What's going on?

The silence is temporary... I'm creating books right now so I've got nothing new to post at the moment.

Book number 1 is ordered. It is Grandpa Mike's 70th Birthday, and I created and ordered it through Apple's iPhoto Application in iLife '08. I pre-ordered iLife '09 today as well and it should arrive on February 6th. iPhoto '09 features face detection and automatic tagging of known faces. I'm pretty excited about that feature. iMovie '09 (also part of iLife '09) features incredible "jitter" stabilization that removes hand shake from video. Again, I'm quite excited about this as well. First impressions on creating and buying books from Apple through iPhoto? Easy but expensive. I'm really looking forward to seeing the quality.

Book number 2 is in process. It is a "best of" our kids photo book (2006-2008) and I am creating it through a recommended photo service named blurb. The kind community over at FredMiranda.com recommended it to me. It is 115 pages so far, but the customization level is nice and the pricing looks much better than Apple iPhoto. Curious to see who delivers the better quality.

Book number three will follow, and it will be by another repeatedly recommended service named MyPublisher.com. More on that later.

After my little burst of hardcopy publishing is over, it's on to Cindy Lou & Rob's wedding. I'm excited to start working on these pictures. Beautiful couple, beautiful setting, beautiful light. Should be interesting.

Michael's Baptism

I'm trying to get rolling again. I'm slow to learn a new OS, a new Photoshop, and an all-new intermediary step (Lightroom 2 instead of Bridge). That said, I've completed post-processing and upoad of my first project with the new workflow. Here is Michael's Baptism.

To put things in perspective, this is my last project from the month of June. I've got a lot of catching up to do, and will most likely start jumping out of chronological sequence to get some of my larger and perhaps more important projects out of the way and uploaded.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving.

breaking the silence

It has been a few days since my last post. The delay is primarily because I am switching equipment that I use to maintain Half Pint, this blog, and my actual images. I'm waiting for software from Adobe that should get me operating on the photo development side of things shortly, and should have new posts and image updates rolling out again smoothly by the end of the week.

The nature of the changes are that we've switched from a Photoshop CS3 / Windows environment to a Photoshop CS4 supported by Lightroom 2.0 in Mac / OS X environment. I am looking at Aperture 2.0 as a possible alternative to Lightroom 2.0 as well, but I don't see that as being my likely route. At the same time, I'm trying to develop a reasonable and safe data storage and management policy, and I'm trying to best understand how to create a workflow that safely stores and backs up our images, plus our video, music, personal data, etc.

I'm considering a workflow that mirrors The DAM book (a must read for anyone with lots of "Digital Assets" that they want protected, be that images, movies, whatever.) We are likely to go with Drobo as our data-storage solution (it is automatically redundant and self monitoring), and Mozy as our online backup provider.

Today's news

I'm starting to seriously price shop a Mac Pro as my photography machine. My poor PC is brought to its knees by Photoshop CS3, and I want to make the upgrade to CS4. I guess it will be a cross-grade instead.

I have officially given up on the T-Mobile G1. I'm switching back to a BlackBerry Curve until T-Mobile gets a newer BlackBerry (hopefully the Bold - I'm more interested in that than I am the Storm). I can not fault HTC for my disappointment. They built a physically impressive and enjoyable phone. The Android Operating System, to me, seems buggy, and when combined with the comperably weak T-Mobile network, well... you get the picture.

I'm plugging away at the New Jersey images. I'd say I'm making good progress with about 20 more uploaded tonight.