Listening to my favorite film photography podcasts, I occasionally hear of people creating zines, essentially simple magazine-style booklets of their photographs to share with others. Coming off a Labor Day trip to San Francisco, I had a good set of photographs of Chinatown, which I thought would make a nice collection, so I made my first zine!
I used Blurb Books to create it. I am quite familiar with Blurb and use the Lightroom to Blurb book creator tool to create photo books of family trips. Sadly, that book creation tool in Lightroom, does not work to create magazines, so you have to use the Blurb BookWright application to lay out your zine. It’s easy enough to use, but I love the templates I’ve created in Lightroom, and feel restricted by the BookWright offerings. Perhaps this has been remedied with Lightroom Creative Cloud, but I haven’t broken down to go to the cloud yet. I like both Lightroom and Photoshop as standalone applications. I can use my templates in Lightroom and export as a .pdf to upload too BookWright, so it’s not tragic, just not as easy.
Blurb offers two options for its magazine, economy and premium. The economy magazine offers 65# covers in semi-gloss finish and 70# glossy pages. The premium has an 80# semi-gloss cover and 80# matte finish pages. I opted for the premium magazine with the perfect binding and I’m really pleased with the final product. It feels more like a slim book than a magazine. Blurb is not cheap, and the coupons they offer oftentimes do not include the magazines. There is a price break when your order larger quantities, 10% off 10-19 magazines, 20% off 20-49 magazines, and 25% off 50 or more magazines.
It is always great to see your images in print!
Our friends, Andre Domingues and Mike Gutterman, share their impressions of the zine on the November 1 and October 25, 2018 episodes of the Negative Positives Film Photography Podcast. It’s a great podcast for lovers of film photography. Subscribe here!