This BOOK will change your Photography

So many landscape photographers search for that one book – the holy grail – the book that explains everything, the secrets about landscape photography, what they have to change in their photography to get masters. But sometimes the answers are closer to us than we would think.

#1 This Book will change your Photography

It’s a simple photo book – a book with your own photos inside. Every year I print a photo book with my best photos inside. This improved my photography massively!

#2 How can a Photo Book improve your Photography?

That’s so easy. Choose your best photos you took in the last year and let them print into a photo book. I always have it on my coffee table, so it’s always reachable and whenever I have time, I grab it and look through my photos. This improves? Yes, it does!

I enjoy my photos, but I also reflect the compositions. I think about, what would I do better or at least different today? I don’t have any pressure at it, it’s just a book and I only look into it, when I have time for it. But when I know, what I would do different, I can either go to the spot again and take the photo again – in the way I thought when looking in my photo book, or I think about it when I’m out next time at any location and I come into a similar situation. It helped me so much to improve my landscape photography. But it doesn’t only work with landscape photography – it works with each genre of photography.

#3 How to print a Photo Book?

I let my photo books print at labs. But consider, that there is a big difference between the labs. Recently I tested the professional line of Saal Digital (www.saal-digital.com). It’s more expensive then most other labs, but the quality is amazing. And hey, I’m not sponsored by them, to say something like this!

You can choose different types of covers. I decided for a wooden optic and an acryl cover with one of my photos inside – this looks amazing! And then you upload the photos either over the webshop or some labs, Saal Digital for instance, offer an own software to design the photo book. The software is free of charge and easy to install and easy to use. I like the lay flat binding of the book of Saal, by the way. So I can easily go over the middle with my photos when I’m designing. And it looks so fantastic to see my own photos in a book.

#4 How do I get better Quality in my Photo Book?

Saal Digital offers the possibility to configure, that they optimize the photos for you. If you don’t have experience with printing and you don’t want to engage more with printing, I can highly recommend to choose this option.

But if you want to get the best possible quality out of your own photo book, what I do is: I calibrate my screen all few months, so that the colours are correct. Then I download the soft proof profile especially for the paper. The labs offer such icc profiles usually for soft proofing – then I install it on Lightroom.

Soft proofing means, that Lightroom or Photoshop simulates how the photo would look printed especially on the paper. It shifts the temperatures and the colours and it also changes the contrasts in the shadows. This is a very important point, by the way: Whenever you print your photos, consider that the tonality from 0 to ~20% - dependent on the paper doesn’t show a difference between the colours. This is why I increase the shadows before printing in most cases.

Check out my gear, which I use for my landscape photography:

My Landscape Photography Gear

Nice greetings,

Christian