Publish your own work as PDF: what it’s all about?

Every photographer dreams of publishing a portfolio or a book of his work. Until some years ago, this dream was possible only for professionals with a large audience, given the technical problems and the expenses needed by the task.

Nowadays the publishing of portfolios and books is made easier given:

• the high quality reached by ink jet printing, which made affordable even to amateur photographer to create a portfolio of archival quality
• the diffusion of self-publishing sites like Lulu and blurb that permit to publish your own book even in a single copy; the quality is no match for traditional photographic books, but is probably enough even for advanced amateur

But these new possibilities don’t solve the major problems of printed books and portfolio: promotion and distribution.

As for promotion, the web is now the way to go. Starting with photo sharing site like flickr, creating a blog with news on your works and a web site with your portfolios permit the photographer to reach a global audience. It not easy: if you don’t want professional aid, to be effective you must have some notions of web design, css, seo and other buzzwords like these. But it can be done without great expenses.

Distribution is another story. It’s expensive and time consuming…

Here enters PDF publishing. By creating a PDF file with your photos you can control how they are displayed and the distribution is as easier as putting the file on your web sites. This type of publishing is strongly favored by Brook Jensen of Lenswork: he used it for the extended edition of Lenswork and for his personal portfolios. He advocates PDF publishing in many podcasts and now in an online workshop.

I won’t enter in the details of his argumentation, you can refer to the links above. But here is a short list the advantages that Jensen sees in PDF publishing:

• PDF could go full screen to use all the available screen real estate
• you could give to PDF a guided navigation, but still permit for personalized navigation
• PDF is distributable on the web or in cd/dvd
• PDF could be used as a simple slide show or for something original and new (for example adding music or comments)

I was very interested in these arguments and so I gave it a try. I recently created and printed two folios (even there following the Brook Jensen lead, but that’s another story): At the end of a fishing day and Cantiere Escavazione Porti. So I decided to make a PDF of these folios: here and here. In the next posts I will give some indications on how to structure and create a PDF, with examples from my folios.