My printer has been taken away. (Sob!) I turned the printer back over to Don Friday. He loved the prints I was doing for him and thought the price I charged reasonable but his sister, who bought the printer and was selling the prints on eBay, thought they should only be paying $5 to print a 16x20. Don couldn't make her see otherwise and Don and his sister had a falling out so she wanted the printer back to sell. Now I need to work on getting another one.

In the meantime I'm toying with the idea of doing a book. There is a new industry called print-on-demand (POD). You create the book on the software that the POD company is set up for, submit the file to them, and then, when someone orders the book, they print a copy and mail it out. They cost a bit more than a conventional book but there are no upfront printing costs. There are a number of companies doing this such as Lulu and CreateSpace. Some require using their own page layout software, some just need a full size JPEG of the page. CreateSpace, which is allied with Amazon, takes a PDF file with embedded fonts. Books printed by CreateSpace also can be listed on Amazon.

Two photography blogs I follow have been encouraging readers to put together POD photo books: Paul Butzi and Mark Hobson. I may take the bait.

If I do, there is a project I want to do but I will wait to announce it when it's firmed up. I plan on using CreateSpace which means I will need to provide a finished PDF file. The expensive desktop publishing tools can create PDF files but, yes, they are expensive. There is one open source (free) desktop publishing tool that I have been looking at that seems to be very powerful: Scribus.

Yet another project. In the meantime I've been using my 2 1/4 square Hasselbladski (Salut-S) and my Diana-F arrived (traded for wrist straps.) Pictures soon.