SAAL photo book - Umbria and Assisi

The walls and doors were taken in Assisi (a photo of my latest photobook).

My first photobook from SAAL digital was brought across by a neighbour who had taken possession from the DHL delivery man on Tuesday afternoon.   I'd uploaded (slowly) on Thursday evening, by Friday morning I'd received an email to say it had been printed and by Tuesday afternoon it had been delivered.  I just love German efficiency.   The quality is absolutely superb too.  I don't usually print on gloss paper, but the substantial glossy paper in the book looks wonderful and the stay-flat layout lends itself to double page spreads.  I'd seen one previously that friend Nick brought to the camera club and I was seriously impressed, enough to make me apply for a voucher to gain a discount on the price.  So yes I was sponsored, but I'd quite happily pay the full price for this kind of quality.  I'm just trying decide what the focus of my next one will be.

Every since we inherited boxes and boxes of my dads Alpine Garden slides I've thought about how we preserve the best of our photography and feel that unless we find a way of presenting our images in an accessible way, then the images we have taken over the years will be totally lost (even more so now we've gone digital).  So it feels to me that a photobook offers one solution to this issue.  Not that they are quick and easy to construct but I've found that it provided me with a focused way of whittling down several hundred images into a nineteen double page spread (just under 100 images).   I'm giving a travel and photography talk at the camera club in October, so this exercise has got me thinking.   I had to come up with some categories to help me select and in the end I chose countryside walks around the hotel, Il Relais Canalicchio, which gave me the opportunity to share views of olive groves, wild flowers and butterflies and then I focused on our urban visits to Perugia and Assisi. The book is just about A4 and the format has enabled me to share collages of images when I want to convey the overall `sense of place' and to feature several others at a larger size (the ones that I think might be worthy of submitting into competitions. Oh and I've also got a few personal ones in there too.  So when the talks are long gone we'll have some wonderful memories to look back on.