Another Escape describes itself as “an outdoor lifestyle, creative culture and sustainable living publication that explores the stories of passionate people and the motivations behind their inspirational lifestyles.” It’s a beautifully designed magazine from the UK. Printed on uncoated paper stock, it feels more like a book than a magazine.
The articles, features, and photo-essays are very engaging. There’s no filler. I found myself reading this issue from cover to cover. Take a look at this article from Volume 5 to get a sense of what this magazine is all about.
Unfortunately Another Escape isn’t available anywhere in Toronto. On a recent trip to Chicago I grabbed the last copy from a newsstand. Fortunately you can order from their website and they will ship to Canada. I’m looking forward to Volume 6 and 7.
I’ve been wanting to create a photo book of my work for a long time. Every photographer should print their work from time to time and create a book at some point. It takes a lot of work but it’s worth putting those pixels to paper.
I selected 50+ landscape photos of my best work and put it into a book that I called Learning to See.
The cover and binding is professionally done and looks great.
Pikto or Blurb?
There are so many choices for self-publishing. I narrowed my options down to Pikto and Blurb. I have a Blurb photo book from another photographer and was impressed by the quality. I’ve used Pikto in the past for prints and liked the ability of seeing various book samples.
Pikto Hardcover Imagewrap
I decided to use Pikto because they had a special promotion where I could buy one book get the second at 60% off. I went about creating a 14 x 11 inch photo book in Adobe InDesign. Pikto also has a web-based app for creating photo books called BOOKit but I wanted complete control of my layout and type.
Using Pikto’s InDesign templates and colour profile, I was able to make a 62 page book without very much difficulty. I exported everything to a print-ready PDF file, put it on a USB drive and took it to Pikto’s shop for printing. They looked over my files and I placed an order for two hardcover photo books with the following specs:
vellum leafs (front and back)
148gsm satin paper
62 pages
hardcover matte laminate “imagewrap” cover
The turnaround time was 4 business days. With the discount and taxes, the final price for two hardcover books was $182 CAD.
The print quality was very good. The binding and the cover is professionally bound and looks great. My only complaint? I found that my photos printed a little darker than I expected. This can be probably corrected by boosting the image levels. Overall I’m very happy with the results from Pikto.
Some of the photos printed darker than I would have liked.
Update:
As of October 2015, Pikto retired its BOOKit service and has introduced a new cloud-based editor for creating photo books. You can still use InDesign templates to create your books.
If you want to be inspired by some fantastic landscape photos of Ireland then have a look at the work of Peter Cox. He recently published his first book which contains his best photographs from the last seven years.
Peter successfully funded his book through Kickstarter and I’m proud to say that I was one of the 341 people that backed the project. Have a look at some of his work. I’m sure you’ll be impressed and wonder why you haven’t been to Ireland recently.
