Well, we’re back from our summer break from the blog. Hopefully you’ve had a great summer and took a lot of memorable photos. Whether you have kids starting school or just recently noticed your commute being delayed by those big annoying yellow buses that stop every 30 seconds, you know it is officially “Back to School” season.

Watching the little one head off to school is hard, but it’s also something to cherish. So whether this year was the very first day of school for your little munchkin or your teen drove to school for the first time, a photo book can be the perfect way to capture the memories. We’re celebrating the start of the new school year with great deals for everyone. Make a photo book to capture the excitement of the first day of school, a compilation book of all the First Days or even your summer vacation and get a second copy for half price.

That’s right. Make any photobook at Inkubook and order it by Monday, August 31, 2009 and get a second copy of the same book for half price. Just enter code SCHOOLDAYS during checkout. (Code may be used once per customer. Not valid with any other offer or promotion).

So get started today. It’s fun. It’s easy. And saving money is always smart.

They did it! You did it! And you couldn’t be more proud. There are few moments in life that make us more proud than watching our kids, family or friends graduate. Show your pride in a photo book gift featuring graduation day photos or make a memory book with all those old school pictures from kindergarten to the senior prom. You will love making it and your grad will cherish it for years to come. Choose from hundreds of stylish backgrounds, including our new graduation photo book theme or upload your own custom pages. Your books will arrive in 7-10 business days.

Order your book at regular price by Friday, June 5, 2009 using the coupon code INKUGRAD09 and get a second copy of the same book for 50% off.

*Offer cannot be combined with any other offer or promotion. Coupon code may be used one time per customer.

We see hundreds of wickedly creative drop-dead gorgeous photo books every day at Inkubook. Lately we’ve noticed by the number of personalized wedding guest books being made that wedding season must be coming soon. One wedding guest book that really caught our attention was one created by the blogger of  Budget Savvy Bride. 

With permission from her talented Franklin, TN-based photographer Evin Photography, the Budget Savvy Bride used several gorgeous photos from her engagement shoot to create a custom-designed wedding guest book on Inkubook. The finished book was amazing. This bride-to-be definitely has style. She opted for a non-lined design allowing her guests to write messages freely throughout the book.  Flip through her Inkubook photo book widget below to get some ideas for your own wedding guest book or pass it along to a friend on Facebook or MySpace who might be getting married this year. Just click the “Get Widget” button and follow the directions.

For those of you who have been pregnant or have lived with someone pregnant, you’re likely aware of the “nesting instinct” that sets in just before baby arrives. This instinct causes many women to make cleaning, shopping and organizing top priorities. At 39 weeks pregnant, I had cleaned everything, bought all that I could, and organized and reorganized every nook and cranny in the house. When there was nothing left to do, I came up with something … getting a jump-start on baby’s first photo book.

Baby photo books made at Inkubook are printed on 100 lb. archival-quality
silk paper, which means they will stand up to years of enjoyment.

When my first daughter was born two years ago, I made a baby photo book  outlining our trip to the hospital, her birth, our time at the hospital, her first car ride and the first 72 hours at home, including her first bath on the kitchen counter. I finally got around to making that book when she was about 8 months old. I wish I had made that photo book sooner, when the events were fresher in my sleep-deprived mind.

This time would be different. This time, I had experience and a little inspiration from Laura, the professional organizer, mom of three and blogger of OrgJunkie on my side. Having made a baby photo book like this before, I already knew what sort of pictures I wanted to include. So, I logged on to Inkubook.com, and started the Simple Square baby photo book. The 8.5 square soft cover book fits nicely on a bookshelf and coffee table and in the diaper bag. I chose the Baby’s 1st Year theme. And in my super-organization state-of-mind, I began to lay out the photo book and write in some of the text I know I’ll want.

Photos you might want to include in your baby photo book:
- Mommy’s belly before and at hospital
- Cord cutting, hospital bath, bracelet
- Mommy, daddy, sibling, grandparents w/baby
- “Birth day” cake
- Car ride home
- First 72 hours at home – feeding, changing, napping, bath

After baby girl arrives and is finally taking a nap longer than 20 minutes, I’ll be able to upload all of the photos and place them in the book, share it with family and friends through Inkubook’s Invite Friends feature and order the photo book before she wakes for her next feeding. How’s that for organized?

A family cookbook can include favorite recipes,
family photos, and colorful backgrounds.

Almost every family has a collection of recipes that are staples either for nightly dinners or for special occassions. For example, a birthday in our family can’t pass without homemade deep dark chocolate cake with dark chocolate frosting. And even without all the recipes that have been passed down through the generations, there are new favorites that enter the rotation all the time, and it’s high time they were all collected in one place.

While it would be perfectly adequate to use Inkubook to create a cookbook that uses plain white on each of the pages, we thought it would be a little more exciting to design some attractive backgrounds to help set off recipes and photos. Whether you include photos of the family members who contributed the recipes, of the people who claim the recipes as their favorite dishes of all time, or of the prepared dishes themselves, having photos in your cookbook will make it more personal and visually interesting, and our backgrounds can enhance that.

Backgrounds from the Cookbook Collection

Backgrounds from the Fundraiser Cookbook Collection

Backgrounds from the Tailgating Cookbook Collection

We didn’t stop with only one collection of backgrounds, though, because we know that cookbooks can serve different purposes. First we have the collection that is simply called Cookbook. There’s no particular theme in this one other than it provides a nice splash of color to the pages. For a cookbook in which you want to divide the recipes according to main ingredient or type of dish,  as when you make a cookbook to sell to raise money for a service organization or charity, we have the Fundraiser Cookbook collection. It features a series of attractive solid backgrounds that have just the hint of an image in the corners. Last, but certainly not least, is the Tailgating Cookbook collection, which features elements common to tailgating parties, picnics, and barbecues. Photos from your favorite sporting events and recipes that travel well in a cooler or without refrigeration will look great in a cookbook adorned with these backgrounds.

As always, we think you shouldn’t let us limit your creativity in making your cookbook. There’s no reason you can’t use backgrounds from all these collections in one book. Simply start by picking one of these themes from the Cookbook category when you start a new book, then use the Get More Backgrounds button to add other backgrounds to your gallery.

Holiday season 2008 is in the near distant past, but that doesn’t mean it’s too early to start thinking about what kind of special gift you might make for someone in 2009. In case you haven’t already thought about taking all your old traditional photos and putting them into a photo book, or in case you think it would be too difficult, it might be time for you to think about it a little more. Inkubook member Dick Fey made three books for his children and wrote us to say how pleased he was with them, so we asked Dick if he’d let us tell everyone a little about his experiences with Inkubook.

Dick is a semi-retired business ownder from Leawood, Kansas, which is a suburb of Kansas City. His plan had been to make DVD videos of old 8mm film for his children as a Christmas present. He sent many rolls of 30-year-old film to a company for professional transfer to digital format, and he also scanned lots of pictures himself. Then he made a video slide show and put it on DVDs. Once he got that part done he thought he was finished with his gift. Then he found Inkubook. Here’s what he had to say:

“I’d never heard of you, but your website looked interesting, so I decided to play with it a little. It was perfect timing, since I already had all the pictures readily available. I thought that perhaps having a ‘coffee table book’ of the pictures would be a perfect addition to the gift pack. I’d never made a picture book before–in fact I didn’t even know the technology existed. I found the website very easy to comprehend and use, and had a good time doing it.

Dick Fey and his children with their books.

“Initially I was concerned about quality; buying over the Internet when you can’t actually touch or feel the product is difficult, at least for me. I was pleasantly surprised when I began to receive the books. They were better than I had expected. Even pictures that Inkubook had marked as questionable came out OK.

“We gave our children the books for Christmas, and, boy, were they thrilled! I think the immediate gratification of the photo book was even more important to them than the videos.”

So whether you’re in the market for a good mid-winter activity to keep you busy or you want to get started on a present for holiday season 2009, think about scanning some of those old photos and putting them in a modern and attractive photo book. Dick Fey is happy he did, and you will be, too.

Some time ago I confessed that I have a secret desire to learn to take really impressive pictures that would look wonderful in a photo book. So when I saw Bob Ross’s Inkubook Serene Moments: The Photography of Bob Ross, I was more than a little jealous.

Bob has been a serious amateur photographer for about 40 years, and now that he’s retired and doesn’t have the demands of raising a young family he has more time available to devote to photography. Before he retired he spent a lot of time traveling by car on business trips, and he found that his love of photography gave him a greater appreciation for his surroundings than he otherwise would have had. Now he takes pictures on a monthly basis, and he sees it as some people see fishing: It’s great when he comes home with something nice, but it’s just as great when he doesn’t.

Bob was kind enough to share some tips that he feels contribute to his ability to take fantastic photos, so we’re sharing them with you today. This weekend, get out in the fresh air to try your hand with some of these suggestions. The change of seasons is a perfect opportunity to take photos of your surroundings. After all, practice makes perfect!

Photography Tips
1. Use a tripod whenever possible.
2. If your camera accepts filters, use a polarizing filter. It reduces glare and increases the color saturation, as well as darkens blue skies. Caution: Look through the viewfinder and rotate the polarizer to see the effect you want or it could have the opposite effect from what you’re seeking.
3. The first hour after dawn and the last hour before sunset are the best times for shooting. The low light models objects better and increases color saturation. Sun directly overhead is the poorest light, but if you like the scene and it’s midday, shoot it anyway. An overcast day is also great for fall photography.
4. Backlighting of fall leaves is wonderful. Backlighting is where the sun is coming from behind the object you’re shooting and lighting up translucent objects such as leaves. Be careful, however, to avoid the sun shining directly on the front of the camera lens.
5. When composing the scene, try to place objects of the greatest interest (such as a lone tree in a field or a church steeple set against a hillside) anywhere other than dead center in the picture. Moving objects of interest to the upper right, lower right, upper left, or lower left is more attractive placement than having them in the center. Try it. You’ll see the difference.
6. If there is a horizon in your picture, it is best to NOT place it right in the center. Move it up if you’re emphasizing the foreground or down if you want to emphasize the sky. Having the horizon in the center is static unless you’re shooting something with a reflection of itself in a pond or lake.
7. Close-ups are always a good idea. A few leaves on the ground or berries are appealing subjects for close-ups if your camera allows.

Tips for Digital Processing
Most digital cameras default to a setting that yields softer and less colorful pictures. That’s because so many shots are taken of people. When working with nature photography, you overcome this by using the software that came with your camera to process the photos on your PC. Experiment with increasing color saturation, contrast, and sharpness. Always sharpen a photo LAST, after having made all other changes. You’ll find that you can double the impact of a digital photo by careful use of the adjustment options that come with the software. After you’ve made your adjustments, you’ll want to click on File then Save As. Rename the picture, and when you finally save it you’ll be making a clone of the original with all your changes while saving the original so that you can go back to it if you don’t like the results or want to experiment more.

General Suggestions
Consider these scenes for your fall photography: waterfalls, decrepit old barns with colorful trees beside them, lovely old homes, or any kind of water such as a stream, a pond, or a lake. You can photograph property without permission from a public position, but always ask permission before going onto private property.

Lucy’s First Year

To conclude our week-long tribute to all things kid-related, we’re featuring a book called Lucy’s First Year. “The Lucy book,” as we like to call it around here, was created by Betsy Braun. Betsy was one of our first customers, and her book has had an interesting history.

Betsy created the book way back in early summer as a surprise for her sister and brother-in-law. It chronicles the first year of her niece’s life plus a little bit from the pre-Lucy era (Betsy included a some ultrasound pictures and photos from her sister’s baby shower). Betsy collected stories and thoughts from other family members to add some narrative interest to the book. Because the book was a surprise, she collected the stories manually rather than using the Invite Friends feature. Betsy said, “I wanted to keep as much of the book as possible a surprise and was worried that a few people might sneak or allow my sister and brother-in-law…to take a look…. I plan to use the built-in invitation feature in the future to allow more sharing.”

Betsy received her book and was very happy with it, but a few months later she had an opportunity to go back and make a few revisions using the updated version of Inkubook. She found the improvements we’d made to be quite helpful. “It was much easier the second time around to format the text exactly how I wanted it,” Betsy said. “Also, the many different background options made the book much more colorful. My most favorite part of the updated book was the matte cover–it looked amazing. I liked the cover before, but as soon as I saw the new book I LOVED the cover! The matte cover really put the final professional touches on the book that I wanted.”

We’re thrilled that Betsy enjoyed her book-making experience so much, and we’re especially pleased that she found our improvements and enhancements helpful. If you’re new to Inkubook, you’re lucky to get to try us out for the first time after we’ve already worked out some of those early kinks. We’re constantly working on improvements, so things will get even more slick and fancy over time.

Here we are at the end of our journey: Part IV of the ”Making Photo Books: Planning Your Approach” series. For those of you who have been with me since the beginning of the series, give yourself a pat on the back. For those of you who are just joining me, you might want to revisit the other parts in this series about forming a plan to make a book:

• Part I covers deciding what type of book to make
• Part II is about making a simple outline and starting to organize your photos
• Part III discusses making scans of odds and ends to include in your book and how best to name your photo files

In many photo books, getting the photos ready is the task that takes the bulk of the time. After all, photos tend to be the centerpiece of photo books. But sometimes there are a few other loose ends to tie up before you really launch into making a book. Sometimes, it helps to…

6. Type the Stories

For the most part, I type my text directly into the Inkubook text editor. That way, I know which photos I’ve placed on which pages and I can easily refer to them or customize my narration according to what’s on the page. I can also judge more accurately how much space I have in the layout where the text belongs.

There are times, though, when I prefer to type something in Word and upload it. Recipes for my cookbook, for example, might be easier to type out before I put them in the book, or I might just upload recipes I already have stored on my hard drive. Or if I plan to have some pages in the book that are text and only text, typing them in advance allows me to take advantage of some of the tools that Word has that the Inkubook text editor doesn’t, such as spell check. While the Inkubook text editor is a handy tool, it doesn’t have some conveniences of more robust word processors.

There’s just one other thing I need to do, and that’s…

7. Plan to Send Invitations

My hard work is mostly done. I’ve done my brainstorming, my planning, and my organization. I’m ready to ask someone else to do some work, and one of the terrific things about Inkubook is that it’s really easy to ask other people to contribute to books without the hassle of sending them a file to read through and update. That process always ends in tragedy. (OK, maybe “tragedy” is a bit melodramatic, but it’s never simple.) Shuttling a file around from one person to another usually holds up my progress because I have to wait for person A to finish what he’s doing before I can work on the project myself; otherwise, I’ll end up with multiple versions of the files.

It’s one of my favorite photos from 1981, but you can probably
see why my family might prefer something more recent.
I’m the short one on the left.

After I’ve sent my Inkubook invitations everyone can work simultaneously in one centralized location. In the case of my cookbook, many of the recipes I plan to feature were given to me by my mother and sister, so I’ll be sending them invitations. The fact that we can all upload to one location without overriding each other means my pokey mother (I love you, Mom!) can work at her own pace while my super-efficient sister works at hers and there’s no conflict between the two. I’ll be asking them to include a picture of themselves (largely because I’m sure they’d rather have me use current pictures of their own choosing rather than some of my favorites from 1981) as well as any recipes they’d like to have added to the book. When I’m done putting the cookbook together, I can ask them to preview the book to make sure I don’t have any awful errors in the text. (I’ve learned the hard way that three tablespoons of salt used in place of three tablespoons of sugar can be very, very bad.)

So there you have it. I’ve now shared my seven steps to planning and crafting an Inkubook. I like to tweak systems to make them better as I get more practice, so I’m still really interested in how you all do things, so please feel free to email suggestions to ckughen at inkubook dot com. Maybe we’ll get enough ideas to continue the series!

So in Part I and Part II of “Making Photo Books: Planning Your Approach” I talked a little about deciding what type and style of Inkubook to make, and I gave some suggestions for how to get started on organizing your content. In this part I’m going to share a few ideas about things you can include in your book that you might not have already thought about and give you one more nugget of wisdom about preparing your files for uploading. If you’re not already on the edge of your seat, you should be, because first I’m going to suggest that you…

4. Make Scans of Miscellaneous Artwork, Memoribilia, and Documents

A scan of the recipe card for my grandmother’s coffee cake.

We talk a lot about “photo books” at Inkubook, but that doesn’t mean that every image you use in your book has to be a photo that you took with a digital camera. Most of us have odds and ends lying around that would be easy to scan and appropriate to use in a book. For example, when my husband and I make books about our family, we regularly scan artwork from school, letters to Santa, and official documents (like our marriage certificate). In the cookbook I’m working on, I might include a scan of the original recipe card for my grandmother’s coffee cake. That way it’ll be preserved forever even though the recipe has been transcribed to a nice, new book. Scans can add extra dimension to your photo book and can help round out the story you’re telling.

After I’ve made the scans, I make sure to place the files (or copies of them) in the same folder where the other images for my book are stored. In case you’ve forgotten, the reason I do this is because it saves me a little time and confusion if I don’t have to search my hard drive to cherry pick the files for my book. Whenever I’ve had to search a number of different folders to find the photos I need, I inevitably find myself returning to the same folder over and over again because I can’t remember that I’ve already checked there. It’s like when I have to drive around the block three times before I can finally get to the entrance of the parking garage, and that frustrates me. Better to just have everything collected in one place so that it’s ready to go.

After the scans are made and collected in the designated Inkubook folder, there’s just one last thing I like to do in relation to organizing my image files, and that’s…

5. Give the Photos Descriptive Names

As fancy as digital cameras might be, they don’t go the extra mile toward putting specific names on photos. Wouldn’t it be nice if the camera could identify your subject and give the picture a snazzy name instead of using IMG_0304? We can dream that it will happen one day, but for the time being, I often try to rename my photos with something descriptive.

Renaming your photos is especially helpful if you’re not copying all the files into one specific folder. Beyond that, if you use any page layouts that include caption boxes, you can save yourself some editing after your book is assembled. In layouts that use caption boxes (usually a small text box that’s very close to the photo box), the caption boxes are automatically populated with the filename of the photo. Sometimes I choose to not use the captions at all, in which case I just delete the text in the caption boxes. But when I am using captions, I don’t have to redo them all in the editor when I’ve already given the file a caption-like name. [Revision: A recent update to Inkubook changed this feature. Now caption boxes aren't automatically filled in with your filenames. Because I like words more than I like random letters and numbers, I'll probably still give my photo files descriptive names.]

The next part is the last in this series (for now). I’m very interested in hearing what suggestions you have because I’m always looking for ways I can do things more efficiently. Please share your ideas by sending a comment through our Feedback form!