I totally lied when I said I was done with Barbados posts. Sorry. At least it’s a bit warmer in the UK now, so looking over holiday snaps doesn’t feel so painful. I knocked together the video above from the clips I took on my camera. The speeded-up timelapse sunsets are my favourite part!
I semi-forgot that I took a film camera along too – my trusty Olympus Trip-35 – so just got around to getting the photos developed.
Finally, Blurb offered me a chance to try their custom book printing service again (here’s my first book), so I had a fun evening with their BookSmart software creating a holiday album of my favourite digital snaps.
I went for full-on luxury this time: a large format landscape book with image-wrapped cover. It looks stunning – a true coffee table tome – and the inside pages are so vibrant, they really do colourful Barbados justice.
Their Booksmart software is a great tool to use if you want more control over the layout of your book. It takes a bit of getting used to and can be a little slow and crashy – but bearing in mind it’s dealing with 800mb of images I can forgive that, and it saves automatically so you never lose anything. But it was easy to reorder and add pages and to make sumptuous full-bleed double-page image spreads. You can also create custom collage templates to add several photos per page (or use the premade ones), and add text captions in a large choice of fonts.
I’m super pleased with how my book turned out – it will be living in pride of place on the coffee table next to my Bajan pottery and foraged fossilised rocks. My family all want a copy too, so I think I’ll be ordering a few more smaller format versions. For £15 off your first order, just click here to get started, entering code FRIEND at the checkout.
Blurb gave me a voucher to review their service, and the referral link is an affiliate link
Comments (5)
Michelle
April 9th 2013 at 10:28 pm
Great video – felt like a mini holiday to the Islands.
Michelle
April 10th 2013 at 10:13 am
The video is amazing! Looks like such a lovely and relaxing place.
Thanks for the Blurb discount code! I selected one of the cheaper soft cover options to test it out and it’s only cost me just over £5. Bargain!
Louise
April 11th 2013 at 6:28 am
Hey Katie, Love your blurb book! I’ve been trying to get around to making a few of these from my travels but am just so awful at cutting down on my photo choices! I spent a month in Nepal and currently have a book of about 450 pages! Eeek! Any tips for photo selection?
Katie
April 11th 2013 at 9:58 am
I feel your pain – I had over 1,000 photos from just ten days in Barbados!
I tried to tell a story of each day over one double-page spread only. I did break that a little bit (like with the turtles and wildlife), and together with the full-bleed image pages my book’s about 30 spreads in total.
Helen Wells
April 11th 2013 at 10:01 am
Dear Katie
I’ve just found your beautiful website and blog about Blurb books. You have inspired me. Thank you so much for sharing the discount code.
Happy days.
Helen xx