Ouch.

Going through brief periods of pain right now.

Finding a print on demand publisher. This was not a pleasant task. My criteria included good to great quality work, reasonable prices, allows me to design my own layout using InDesign, offers hardcover and landscape book orientation. Blurb seemed very close to the service I wanted. However if I used InDesign, I'd have to convert each page to an image and place each image on a page using the blurb client. Tedious and potentially acceptable, but putting text into a jpeg seemed to be a lot less crisp when printed. I decided on Lulu. I can layout in InDesign and publish to a PDF which is quickly uploaded to the Lulu website. I can get a hardcover book, but have to give up the landscape format. I decided to go with the 8.25"x10.75" size.

Getting back in the saddle with InDesign. Since my high school PageMaker days, I have loved doing layouts. When digital images became popular, I really wished I could just design a photo album in PageMaker and have it printed somewhere. The print on demand industry is slowly catching up, but most require the use of simplified layout clients where you have less control. Last year, when I researched various Adobe packages, I learned that InDesign was the new PageMaker! Sweet! I wanted to get back into dabbling in desktop publishing, so I purchased the Adobe CS3 Design Premium package. SoFoBoMo is my first good reason to start learning the new features of InDesign.

Monday evening, I started playing with InDesign once I had settled on specific output specifications. (In creating a layout, the first step is to know the size of the pages, margins and bleed.) It was tough. The page layout asked for sizes in pica, not inches. I finally had to ask Google for help. Then I really fumbled around importing a test image. It seems importing the image from windows vmware to my linux host operating system results in an error. Moving the image to exist within vmware is a reasonable work around that issue. I continued to make a mess of things when I imported my image. I figured it would be easy to resize either in Lightroom and re-export it to the right specifications or just resize within InDesign. Neither option seemed to work for me. As I thought about it later, I realized back in the olden days, I didn't work with digital images in PageMaker, only digital clip art. We physically pasted physically cropped photos onto our printed layouts. With the learning curve being steeper than I had hoped, I decided to just order a book on InDesign. It should arrive on Friday.

Cracking a glass filter. This was unexpected, but completely my fault. I usually set my camera down on the floor by my camera bag's strap when I'm not using it. I did the typical thing, but I think my strap was set a little longer than usual, and so my camera bag hit the floor sooner and harder than I expected. Oops. But it was in the bag, so it was fine... right? The next time I started snapping pictures, Jay noticed huge cracks across the lens. I looked at it and instantly realized what caused it. No big deal, it was only the filter glass that was cracked; the lens itself was fine. I have ordered a replacement, and will now set my bag down more cautiously in the future. Lesson learned!