How many of us are guilty with not helping with the photo development industry after getting our digital camera? Not having any hard copy photos to show and tell?

My house has a few framed up photos of my nieces when they were young, but none of Zara’s. I am so guilty.

I used to develop photos very often when we were still using the good old camera which required films. After we changed our camera to a digital camera, since Nov 2003, not a single photo had been developed even when we’d taken tons of photos. All of them were burnt into CDs or just residing in my HDD.

After seeing Mom2ashley blogged about Pixart, I decided I should get an album done for Zara. It took another 3months before I submitted the files to Pixart. Being kiamsiap (stingy) Wanting to stretch my dollar further, I selected the best photos from Zara’s first year and compiled them into a photobook.

You use the pixart software to select a theme, arrange your photos, put in your caption, and then ftp the file over to pixart once done. Payment is made via the web.

There are 2 types of paper you can print on, one is photo print (pages are just like photos you developed in the shop), another is digital print (using 250g paper, which is like those very good quality magazine papers). I chose photo print, because I wanted the book to last as long as it could (photo print papers have been said to be able to last up till 50yrs without fading of colours). For a 17 pages photobook, it costs me RM135 including postage. You should see Daddy moaning, when he learnt of the price, not that he’s paying (That’s why I can’t be a SAHM, he’s always ‘moaning’ even when I’m spending my own money)!

We got the photobook on Monday. All nicely bound up, very professionally done. It is a hard cover coffee table book kind of album.

The cover

One of the pages

The only problem with the printing is the darkness of the photos. Some of them looked darker when printed than it was on screen. It was also my mistake for not brightening them up (available in their software) before submitting them for printing.

Next time, I’ll do better.

Added at 7:15pm :
The guy from Pixart dropped by just now to collect my photobook for reprinting of one page (and of course rebinding of the whole book, for free) since they accidentally cropped one of the photo. He showed me some very nice photobook samples for special occasion like a wedding, a full moon party, and photobooks printied on digital print (i.e. pages are like very thick magazine papers).

They are very nice, I think they are nicer alternative to those wedding albums that we traditionally have, what more you can put your own caption, and not those default non-meaningful (or even incomprehensible, sometimes) captions that normally come with the bridal house albums.

Aw.. Looks like I’m going to do more album for Zara, and maybe, just maybe, I will scan all my wedding photos and make a wedding album for myself.