I've been looking into the practicality of making photo books. There's no single winner as far as I have been able to make out, and I have not yet actually tested any of them. But here's what I believe the practical options are:

Lulu is optimized for text: books with words and some pictures. You send them a PDF and they print you a book. But not any PDF will work: in particular Pages PDFs are shunned. There are ways around this restriction but they cost money and/or are fiddly. Lulu's prices are OK.

Blurb is optimized for photos: books with photos and some words. Their prices are very good, and the quality is good. You have to use their tool, BookSmart, to create the book and upload it. It's template-driven and drag and drop. However, it's written in Java, is incredibly slow, and has enough interface and font quirks to drive a person batty. The templates are large in number, but ultimately limiting because they are it. These are not starting-points. Either the photos go exactly there, or they don't go. The good news is that it can only get better, but to date progress has been slow.

Aperture's and iPhoto's books are expensive and the tools limited, so I didn't seriously consider them.

Everyone else's solution is either aimed at a specific market. MyPublisher is extremely dumbed down and doesn't match what I want to do. But they have a great native Mac application called BookMaker.

I'll probably go for Blurb if I do make a book, but it will be on my terms. I'll design my book using Pages or something and then only as a last step put it all into BookSmart. Another option is to upload full-resolution JPEGs of pages designed outside of the application, so I may use that technique sparingly.

But first I need content.

Tags: Photography, Books, Aperture

Lucas Martell shows how he made Pigeon Impossible, an animated short. You can see the making of on YouTube, the blog, or the web site. The videos on YouTube are great, and show just how much work even a short feature takes.

Tags: Movies, Animation, Pigeons

The Gallery of Sawn In Half Cameras also includes lenses. Now I know why my 70-200 f/2.8L IS is no darn heavy.

Tags: Photography, Hacking, Lenses

4th July Fireworks: 2.5s f/8.0 ISO100 80mm, Canon 30D, Canon 70-200 f/2.8L IS

I have a small selection of fireworks photos in my Canon 30D gallery now. My style is to use a long lens and record the detail of the display rather than try to capture the whole thing. I used ISO 100, f/8 for all of them, varying the exposure time according to how much movement I wanted. I used a tripod of course, one of the few occasions that I do, and turned IS and AF off. JPEGging them for upload loses a lot of the detail, and that's unfortunate because they are very sharp.

Tags: Fireworks, Canon, 30D

You heard it here first. Apple will buy Tesla Motors. Yes, it's a crazy idea, but actually not so far off as you might think.

Apple has the cash. They also have the design and operations know-how. God knows they have the marketing acumen. An electric car is a pile of electronics and they have many engineers. The car industry, at least in this country, is out of touch with its customers, so ripe for the Apple touch. It's high-profile, begging to be integrated with practically everything, and all very glossy. Start high-end, move down-market, and create a whole new class of vehicle.

Can Steve and Jonathon resist? It would certainly be an amazing third act for Steve Jobs.

Tags: Wild Guesses, Apple, Cars