photo credit: Photo Extremist

How old is your last backup?

Check our articles about the photographer’s backup.

1. Local backup options (External hard disk drive)
2. Local backup options (Optical discs (CD/DVD), RAID drives). Interim conclusion is “No local storage“
3. Online backup options (Photo web sites, Friend-to-Friend)
4. Online backup options (Specialized online backup and online sharing web sites, web storage options, software for online storage) and conclusions

1. Open a photo book and start looking for what makes these images great to your eyes.
2. Go to a museum (preferably not about photography, but more about old painting or engraving) and study the composition of the displayed works.
3. Open the user manual of your preferred photo camera and discover those operating modes and features that you never use.
4. Go join a photo club and speak to other photographers; They will teach you new things, new tricks and they will open your eyes if you listen to them.
5. Start Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture, or whatever photo software you use to work again on some of your oldest photos; You are going to rediscover them and you will get new ideas and the will to shoot them again.

photo credit: mikebaird

As a matter of fact, I count 1 point for each of the following criteria:

• A – Attitude, Activity, Action
• L – Light and Exposure
• C – Composition of the image
• I – Interaction of the subject with its environment, model placement
• D – Crisp Details, no blur

After all, if you want a top photo, you could do much worse than try and fill all these conditions. A good photographer will remember these criteria at shooting time; An excellent photographer will apply them without even thinking about it; For my part, I still need to remember them while sorting RAW files under Adobe Bridge.

Wired has an article about this technique. And Flickr allows to search for images resulting from this perillous exercise.

• Examples of camera tossing on Flickr
• Snap a Camera Toss picture

However, this goes through respect for the rules of the photo Jedi.

1. Learn, Young Padawan

A photo Jedi is not taught, he has to keep learning. He has to keep his eye open for the wisdom of older knights, famous photographers. Always come back to the old masters, search and analyze their pictures for what makes them great. You have to acquire an internal feeling for what will make your photos great.

At first, the photo Padawan is only able to watch and fail. But hard work here will open the path to Jedi knighthood.

photo credit: turoczy

2. Do or do not. There is no try

Don’t try to be a good photographer. Become a good photographer.

The Jedi photographer is all about creating great pictures. The master Jedi photographer has recognized that he must be really willing to be one.

If the photo is not as perfect as you want it to be, shoot again. Now!

If the subject is not there when you want it, come back later to shoot it right.

If the light is not the right one, don’t shoot a mediocre picture, wait for the best light.

3. Beware the dark side

Where the Force is, the dark side is too.
Where the light is, the darkness is too.

Of course, you want to ensure that the dark areas of your digital photographs are well exposed and you should learn how to use the histogram and the blinking areas showing underexposed (and overexposed) of your picture on the LCD of the photo camera.

But also, don’t fear the other photographers. There is no competition. Each photo Jedi has his own path. The photo masters are not there for you to feel small and incompetent. They show what can be done with patience. And, don’t shout if you don’t become a photo Jedi master overnight.

Don’t anger when people criticize your pictures. Learn to hear why they dislike your images. Even better, go and show your photos. Ask for the feedback from other photograph Jedi knights in order to learn even more.

4. May the Force be with you!

While growing from Padawan to Jedi knight, from Jedi knight to Jedi master, the photographer in you will grow and your instinct will put itself in your heart.

On this path, the Force of photography will start flowing through your body and soul. You will start feeling from the inside when the light is right, what pictures will look right when printed, where the focal point should be, what rules can be broken.

This growing perception, this sharpened eye is one of the greatest outcome of becoming a photo Jedi.

5. Don’t be a Sith

A photo Sith keeps his pictures covered and hidden by his coat. The photo Jedi is open and seeking for the others.

Help others grow.

Help other photographers. Who knows who will be the next photo Padawan? Maybe this young guy will grow into a photo Jedi master, if you support his budding talent. Obi Wan recognized the talent in Luke despite his being too old for receiving the Jedi teaching.

Help your public. How many people tell “I’m not a photography buff, I just like this picture?” Don’t look at this person as desperately lost out of the photography heaven. He or she may be helped by offering to show photos of some masters. Many a photography book could become the basis for either helping somebody grow into a photo Jedi assistant or even a photo Padawan. Be generous with your art and photography in general; It’s something to be shared.

The Internet is also a great way to share. Flickr, photo-sharing web sites and photo-oriented forums are the place to be.

6. Show empathy

Photography is not only a matter of technique. You must master your weapon (the camera). But it is even more important for the photo Jedi to be in direct contact with and to relate to his subject. It could be a studio model, a wild animal, a landscape or any object; Your photo must express the story that it was telling you. You must be able to render it perceptible to the people looking at your picture.

The story your photo tells must be the story of your subject and it must be told to your public. What story is your picture telling?

7. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for

It’s not enough to use Jedi tricks to reach your goals. It feels good to use the photo Force mere tricks to make a photo. But you are not looking for bland postcards. You are out for excellence. Don’t stop at the first positive reaction from your viewers. When your friends and some people you respect start to recognize that your photos are nice because there the sunset is orange or Grand’ma is not cut out of the frame, it’s time to aim higher in order to reach a point where people will be blown out by your photographer’s prowess.

8. I know there’s still good in you, I can sense it

Luke’s father was lost to the dark side, but he did not loose hope.

Always look for that image which looks irremediably lost. Isn’t it possible to use the Raw file to recover the additional details in the dark areas?

Isn’t it possible to save a hopeless photo just by cutting out the bad part of it? Why not try to re-frame the picture? It’s time to try framing it vertically instead of horizontally (or the other way), to try framing it in a square, to try cutting a panorama out of it.

9. Beware the clones

The Jedi stands out of the croud. In the battle, his light saber will be cutting through the Empire clones.

While the photo Jedi may take his inspiration from all sides, he is seeking his own path. Look at the work of others, but develop your own eye and create your own photos. Do not be afraid to explore your own personal path. Your photos may draw from all that you have seen, your photos may be incorporating many ideas; You must press the shutter trigger to produce your own images.

10. Be direct

The way of the Jedi is not as tortuous as the servants of the dark side wander.

The photo Jedi will express clearly what is his photographic voice. You seek to make sure that the picture is projecting your feelings and your intent. The image will miss its public if it is not aimed right. So, as a photo Jedi, you must not stop at what you felt when you shot the picture. You must always perceive the effect that your picture will have when viewed out of the shooting location. The picture must stand by itself to forward your exact message.

11. Cherish your light saber

The Jedi knight is one with his light saber. The photo Jedi is one with his camera.

Use your camera, use it often, make it your own. When you will start to forget how to move the fingers on the camera body and when you will concentrate on shooting pictures, you will be well on your way to become a photo Jedi.

It does not mean that you need to restrict yourself to only one weapon. As some Jedi knights use two light sabers at the same time, the photo Jedi may have several photo cameras at hand. But he must know them by heart and this only comes from practice, possibly daily practice.

Thanks to Sean Platt and David Wright for their inspiring article in CopyBlogger. I’m glad to know they don’t mind my borrowing of their idea.

When seeing the DIY tilt-shift lens described here a few weeks ago, Ted, one of our most active commenters, mentioned that he had done about the same for a DIY high-quality slide duplicator.

Here is how he described his craft to me:

As I did not want to put my hard-earned money in a new one, I bought a full frame slide duplicator on eBay for 5€. Since my camera is an APS, the lens was too far from the rear mount, the slide mount was too close to the lens. Moving the lens closer to the rear mount was easy (just had to reverse-mount the lens internally, check the diagram below), but the slide mount was still too close to the lens and out of focus. So I torn the slide mount apart, and added a small PVC pipe to lengthen the distance between the lens and the mount. As the PVC pipe diameter did not exactly match the original design and was a bit loose, I secured it with a metal clamp. This allowed some added flexibility to perfectly adjust the focus.

Since then I digitized more than 4000 old slides from the 60s, and I’m perfectly happy with it.

Click on the thumbnails to enlarge them

Try and do the same.

This is the extremist extension of a solution I already use: In order to reduce the risk of theft, you can use gaffer tape and cover all distinctive marks and logos. Your SLR may still look bulky, but it will not be recognizable. And it has also the advantage of including the protection of small connectors or covers (and locking down some buttons you don’t want to see moving without your explicit intent).

Very good tip for photo travelers.

1. Local backup options (External hard disk drive)
2. Local backup options (Optical discs (CD/DVD), RAID drives). Interim conclusion is “No local storage“
3. Online backup options (Photo web sites, Friend-to-Friend)
4. Online backup options (Specialized online backup and online sharing web sites, web storage options, software for online storage) and conclusions

So, we started to describe online solutions. Let’s see the most serious and most extensive approaches to online storage.

Specialized online backup and online sharing web sites

Many web sites are now offering services that may be exactly what you need: You send them data files they keep them for you. The most interesting ones include a backup utility which will automatically transfer files in the background.

Now, the big difference (with the previous options) is that you get a fully integrated service. Exactly what most people are looking for: Fire and forget… until you need to restore.

An important feature of nearly all of these services is that they offer a first level of service for free: A few GB of storage without a credit card. But they have a business model relying on some of the biggest users paying a rent on the disk space.

Some of them (like LiveMesh, Live Sync or Syncplicity) include the possibility to synchronize between computers (if you have more than one computer, it is a good way to ensure that the office and home computers have a copy of the same files). This could come handy to the photographer who is traveling with her laptop and is not sure of copying everything back and forth between the laptop and the desktop.

Some services may look interesting but are unusable in backup mode because this function is left to the responsibility (and the hard work) of the user: SkyDrive (despite its 25GB free storage space) and MobileMe fall in this category; They go in the right direction but stop short of it.

Let’s compare some of the best offers on the market.

Of course, these are not the only ones and the readers may offer some additional advice in the comments. You are welcome.

Special recommendations for online backup (or any other backup)

1. Always try and restore a few files to confirm that your setup is correct (it’s not enough to have the service telling you that it’s alright);
2. Check regularly that you did not stop the backup service (it happened to me recently: I wanted to do a test and I forgot to re-start my Mozy backup, for more than a week).
3. Check that the space you rent is sufficient and that you are not nearing the limit. You don’t want to hit the limit while in the middle of an important assignment. And it would be the worst to be -temporarily- unprotected.
4. Notice that the initial backup may be very long. It is not unusual to wait backup 2GB per day. So, the first backup may take days. The next ones will be depending only on what new/modified files must be sent to the server.

The web storage options

Now, there is also a pretty easy option that can be applied. All in all, what you need is a bunch of disk space available for you to store files. This is exactly what most web services provide to people willing to create a web site, except that you will have a size request much larger than most web sites. Instead of 1GB of space, you will need 1TB of disk space.

Pure online storage

Some web hosting companies actually include this possibility. There is usually a cost because they include the cost of serving that data (what you will mostly not use: Once backed up into the web store, you’ll only access to check or to restore). So, you can go and find a web hosting company. For reasonable needs like those of many amateur photographers, nearly any host service will be OK. For example, OVH (the hosting service for my web sites, currently) has a plan for a small server with storage extensible up to 1000GB (RPS_I) for 9.99€ (ex-VAT) plus 2€ per 10GB slice added. It will add up: for 500GB, you would pay 110€ per month. Or you can get a dedicated server (a bit more complicated to setup) with 4x 1500 GB of RAID drives for 89€ per month.

If you want something even bigger and with a much larger upgrade path, you still can ask Amazon. The large bookstore is also reselling part of its networked storage through the Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). It’s priced flexibly and they have essentially no limit to what they can provide. Of course, prices are not always cheap, but it’s hard to beat them.

You can test your own options with their online calculator.

ADrive is also an option here. It offers 50GB of free storage, for individual use, but the Premium offer goes up to 1000GB. But the web interface has been improved, even if the file uploader still requires Java.
If you sign up for a paid account, ADrive is offers advanced features like FTP access (needed here, see below), a larger number of concurrent downloads (for faster restore), SSL encryption, and a desktop client for Mac, Windows, and Linux computers.

Software for online storage

In both these cases, all you need is a way to download data back in case of a crash (essentially nearly all web browsers could do this, but an FTP program will be OK too) and upload data as simply as possible. I recommend using some powerful FTP software program like FLING.

Fling is entirely free, like most of its competitors. And, as I quote from their web site: “Fling is software to help you automate uploading or transferring files. It is typically used to maintain a web site on a remote hosted server or to automate backup of folders. The software supports both file transfer protocol (FTP) and [local] network file transfer.” Exactly what we need here!

One last comment here: It has been said repetitively that Google is preparing a similar offer under the name of Google G-Drive. Nothing exists yet, but it could well be a similar offer starting with a completely free entry point. But this is only a rumor for now.

Conclusions

Which one is for you? I can’t decide if you don’t tell me what kind of photographer you are. But if you are one of the normalized photographers I described, it’s relatively easy.

• The Digital Granddad will most probably go for the External Hard drive (probably along with some Flickr or RedBubble account.
• The Expert has already decided to go the Mozy way.
• I recommend the Pro to check an online solution with FLING.

You’ll have to read the article to be sure in which category you fall, of course. But remember that digital data is flimsy. In a moment, all of your pictures may be gone. Do you really want to try your luck?

These all have the advantage of protecting your backup against one aspect of risk management: There is no longer a risk of seeing a local accident corrupting all of your backup data. No fire, no earthquake can take down both your photos and your backup files. You put the backup on the network, and it is located in some distant location (often with its own integrated company-level backup solution, too: A backup of your backup). So, it’s fairly safe.

On-line backup options

Photo web sites

Right! It may be like an obvious option, but it’s not always a bad one. If you put all your photos on Flickr, not only can you share your images with the rest of the world (or the rest of the family), but you immediately have a copy of your pictures in a server farm at the other end of the world. And, while it may not be easy, you can definitely get them back in case of a too-fast delete or disk crash on your computer.

Of course, there are many options. Those I can think immediately about are:

• MyPhotoAlbum
• Flickr
• PBase

Pick your own.

Obviously OK for small quantities of pictures. But also consider the long time it would take to collect images one by one in case of a computer crash. Tedious is a word coming to mind and it is a clear understatement.

Friend-to-Friend

There is an interesting development to the availability of fast Internet connections: P2P or Peer-to-Peer data exchange. While it is usually associated to music and video files being exchanged between young people and older pirates, there is a surprising extension being seen.

What some people call Friend-to-Friend (or F2F) allows a group of friends (or associates of some kinds) to share some data. Nobody outside your group can see what is happening, but it can be used for distant backup. Let’s suppose you don’t really have an issue with disk space. Why not let your friends backup their data on your disk while you backup your data on theirs?

This is as simple as it comes. Of course, technically, it’s a bit more complex, but it works well. Some software programs like the following, ease that approach with a fully packaged solution:

• Crashplan offers more traditional backup option (see below), but it’s most interesting option is F2F with a friend’s computer, a remote server you rent, etc. Of course, it includes some encryption to ensure that your friend’s do not know what your files are, and its interface is plain simple. CrashPlan is freeware available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
• Cucku works on Windows only. It allows to send encrypted (with 256-bit AES) backups to your friends computers. You’ll notice that it is well integrate in Skype to support part of the exchanges.
• With Zoogmo installed on your computer and your friends computers, you can search each other and send files back and forth. You set it up and it will send files around every two hours. It seems very simple and efficient. Zoogmo is a free download for Windows systems only, and requires a free sign-up.

This is very fine except that you need to use the drives of others. So, you need to get some fairly large available space on the computers of your friends or family. Usually, the reciprocating approach works well, but it means that you must have some level of confidence and a relatively similar interest in backing up each other data. That makes it OK for close friends, or photo clubs members/partners. It usually is less applicable to family links, but it is very interesting indeed: Your backup drive is bought for others while others buy their own backup drive for you…

[To be continued]

Let’s start with other local storage (we’ll keep online storage for later installments of this series).

Optical discs (CD/DVD)

photo credit: bobbigmac

Many people have been using DVDs (previously CD-Rs) to make copies of all their images.

This may look good: copying a bunch of files to a DVD-R is a simple matter and once done, it is pretty difficult to delete the files. You setup yourself for a little routine, and you keep a stack of plastic discs holding all your images in as many copies as you want.

This looks like security; This is not!

While we are repeated that CD life times are reaching a century (DVD life times are only a little shorter), this is only partially true. Let’s see some interesting details:

• Pressed CDs and DVDs have long life times, but this is not exactly the same for CD-R or DVD-R. These writable (or re-writable) discs do not try and claim such long life times.
• Official guaranteed life times can only be reached in the best storage situations: Heat and light are the enemies of optical drives. The manufacturers make their tests in conditions that are not often maintained in a house even with a good AC, like 15°C temperature and strictly no light during years.
• Manufacturing quality may have a considerable impact: From one product line to another, the actual life time may be divided by 2. No brand name is immune to these exceptions. The most expensive ones are not always the best.
• You thought that we were speaking of years? Think again. I had an (involuntary) experiment with several hundred CD-R from many brands, where I exposed them to French Summer temperatures. Within two years, 50% of the discs were no longer readable. That’s right merely two Summers were enough to kill half of all brands of CD-R in storage.
• Evaluating the status of a DVD-R is not easy: When there is one error on the disc, it is silently corrected by the optical drive. The first sign of a problem comes when you no longer can read a file (too late!) Some tools may help, but they are more useful to save the last remnants of data; I wouldn’t be ready to regularly check the status of more than a couple of plastic discs.

RAID drives

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. It describes a way to associate several disc drives in a way that protects them against the failure of one of them. Suppose that a single disc drive suddenly fails, you loose the data right now. In a RAID, discs support each other and (in the right configuration) a single disc failure will be signaled by a message or a blinking light, but the RAID unit will still operate as a fully normal disc.

It is worth mentioning because it protects very efficiently against disc drive hardware failures. Several computer motherboard include the feature allowing to build such unit by merely connecting 3 to 5 normal discs and using a setup wizard. After a failure, you finish your work normally, remove the failed drive, replace it with a new one and forget about this bleep of an incident.

One important thing to remember: This is not replacing a backup because even a RAID drive unit will not protect you against the accidental deletion of a file. On the contrary, it will make sure that your accidental deletion is achieved in the safest way.

Additional recommendations

I can also invite to reading some useful complementary posts:

• Five Best Windows Backup Tools
• Five Best Free System Restore Tools (Windows/Mac/Linux, Free)

No local storage

It is now time for you to remember one important thing in terms of disaster management: Do not underestimate the seriousness of the circumstances that will lead to a loss of data. Rather common reasons to loose your data are fire and theft. If your backup hard drive is in the same room/house as your computer and a fire starts, not only will you loose your house and your computer, but your backup is gone as well. If a burglar enters your flat and leaves with computer hardware, you can be sure that he will take both the computer and the external drive sitting at its side.

Question to the Pro: Do you remember what happened to this photo colleague who lost all of his archives in an office fire a few years ago?

Any local storage is unsafe from this point of view. No hard disk, no DVD would be safe from the accidental fire. You still can ship your backup drive to your mom, but this becomes really cumbersome. In the next installment, we will look at backup solutions that include a storage located at some significant distance.

[To be continued]

Any digital photographer is quickly confronted with the bane of computer memory. At first, you notice that you need a lot of DRAM memory to edit your pictures (using Photoshop for example). The solution is easily found: Add more memory (Here come 4 GB of DRAM!) Then, you discover that all those 20 MP pictures from your SLR photo camera take up a lot of disk space. No problemo! Let’s add an external disk drive like the one here on the right. And you get as much disk space as needed.

You shouldn’t loose a picture

Now, most people would stop here and forget about the next important (Critical!) step: Be ready to backup your photo.

A disk drive is a relatively safe place to store your image files. But it is not immune to the risk of physical or electronic breakdown. Just think about it a second. Don’t wait for the next disk crash.

Even if you are not a pro photographer (and it is is even worse if you are), you probably have a few thousand images lying around. Their individual monetary value may be low (that’s also true for most pros who rely on the sheer mass of their good work to produce regular income rather than on a small number of pictures) but quite a number of these images will be impossible to replace (think about images of the birth of your children, the last picture you took of your deceased parent, the photos you brought back from your unique travel to Patagonia, inner Mongolia, or Yellowstone National Park: Are you ready to loose them forever right now?).

It happened before. I am ready to bet that you lost at least a dozen pictures. It will happen again. Now that you are sensitized to this issue, what can you do? What is the best backup option?

What photographer am I?

I offer to cover a wide span of options to give a few recommendations. But I think that it is useful to differentiate my comments and recommendations depending on the type of photographer that you are. Here are the three user profiles I intend to advise depending on their approach to photography:

1. Very occasional photographer (“Digital granddad“): You came from the old analog world. You have a 10 MP entry-level SLR camera or a good point-and-shoot. Maybe you kept the old camera too, but the pictures are piling up: 2000 files totaling 20 GB. You have no problem to store these on your computer, you want security, but not the hassles of computer tools.
2. Continuous shooting amateur (“Expert“): You shoot a lot of pictures: Your children, your friends, your travels, some artsy pictures, etc. You are concerned that nearly none of these picture files could be replaced and they are already counting up in tens of thousands and 100 to 500 GB. You don’t earn money from these, so you can’t pay a lot. But you are ready to do a little tweaking to get the right solution.
3. Professional photographer (“Pro“): You earn money from your art. You nearly stopped counting the files you have: Hundreds of thousands of images, maybe a million already and more than a 1.000 GB of storage (local storage on your computer has already become a nightmare and you use several hard drives; And this is not slowing down). You don’t have more time to spend on setting up networks, drives, programs, but you may be renting a reasonable solution. If it is 100% reliable.

If you want to know, I am one happy Expert. Last time I checked, I had 116 GB of pictures (not counting any of the bad images I already deleted, but including the finished images ready to use for posters, the web and other applications).

The local backup options

So, let’s see what is possible. I intend to surprise you with some of what you may learn here and in the next posts about these backup possibilities.

External hard disk drive

One of the first ideas coming to mind is to add another disk drive (usually an external one). This is certainly the easiest: Go to your preferred on-line computer shop and get nearly any of the zillion disk drives available. One of the most important decision to make: Choose the nicest or the biggest drive available.

Since it will be used only for backup, you don’t need a very fast one. Since it will be used only once in a while, you don’t need to have it permanently plugged in. There are not many differences between the large brands on the market, but avoid what I call the monsters (extreme drives like size champions or speed champions tends to compromise on other aspects like reliability, which is our priority here). I love the extreme reliability of Seagate drives, but that doesn’t necessarily stop me from buying other brands occasionally.

Notice that some hard drive manufacturers started offering relatively large drives targeting low-cost and high reliability by running them slow: 5400 rpm drives (compared to 7200 rpm or faster) are making a come back on the market. It may be worth considering here.

Nevertheless, it is important to buy a disk that is not too small. Reliability goes with big manufacturing volumes. Buy a disk around 100€ (bare disk), or 120-150€ (with its enclosure). This is the core of the market and the best rliability/cost ratio.

However, the main problem here is that you have to organize the backup by yourself. Some external hard drives incorporate a button on the front: You just press the button and it backs up the designated files or directories. But even if it is as simple as that, studies and experience show that the user (you and me) will forget and backups must be automated.

I suggest the following automated backup tools:

• Cobian backup (Windows, free, donation suggested): A lot of options, very apt at disk-to-disk scheduled backups. Exactly what we need here.
• Backup Maker (Windows, free but with nagging pop-ups): Does external drive backups, optical backups, FTP backups, scheduled backups.
• GFI backup (Windows, free with email registration) is definitely easy-to-use and wizard-driven. Clear and simple.
• PureSync (Windows, freeware) and SyncBack (Windows, freeware and shareware) are tools that specialize in synchronization (and backups): They allow to create and maintain perfect copies of your files, but you take the risk that they will reproduce your erroneous file deletion (you delete the original, then it deletes the copy for you). PureSync allows to create a profile to recognize your digital camera and ignore photos from your memory card already downloaded to your computer (similar to the same feature in Picasa).

[to be continued]

photo credit: irrezolut

A few years ago, the only destination we could think of for our photos was the paper used for most family snapshots. A few photographers were also making large format printouts, but nothing more.

With the advent of digital photography, it is now common not to print at all and to look at the pictures on the LCD screen, on the computer or on the mobile phone used to grab the image.

Print a lot

But, thanks to Internet, we also added the possibility to use printing services to nearly any kind of substrate. Think about it: In most cases, the printing services include at least the options to have your best images printed on:

• Posters
• Cards
• T-shirts, shorts and other cloth
• Mugs
• Caps
• etc.

Print on everything

But is this all? No! I found a series of surprising ways you can use your photos. The imagination seems to be the only limit. Let’s find the list of things I liked (after the jump…).

Shower curtains

Yes! You can have your personalized shower curtain. You can add your own photos to improve the shower. The imagination is definitely the limit.

For $150-200, PhotoShowerCurtain.com will put your pictures on a plastified shower curtain using dye sublimation.

Photo books

Many a print company offers the possibility to print a book (or a booklet) of your photos. I will not recommend one, but I would suggest that you follow the advice from Neil and Naomi Creek in Show your photos like a Pro with a Photo eBook (even if this is targeted at eBooks, a good part of the advice is applicable in print too).

I would also suggest that you take time to check great photo books by photographers like Scott Kelby. I love his work on “The colors of… Tuscany“. Take free inspiration. Try and reproduce the best of his presentation; Your book will be great.

Puzzle blocks

PhotoJojo also suggest that you may be printing your photo on puzzle blocks. A kind of high-quality kids game that is involving your own photography work.

I admit that this could become a nice Christmas present for your kids (or the kid inside your friends). And it is something that you can do by yourself: Make your own puzzle block.

Hand-painted portraits

At the extreme, you can send the photo portrait of your loved ones to Send Me Your Head and receive a 3″ x 3″ painting from artist Karen Schmidt.

This artistic project may sound weird, but I think it’s kind of cool, too.

Copyright (c) Karen Schmidt

Last idea

If you think that this was not enough, you can have a moment of fun and think about what it could be to print your photo directly on a plane.

The first one is a a series of advice by Photocritic: 10 ways to prevent photographer’s block.

1. 100-step challenge: Walk 100 steps, then shoot from there. It may be a nice walk anyway…
2. Recreate a photo you love
3. Visit great photographers web sites
4. Self Portraiture
5. Rapid Fire: 120 minutes, 120 photos
6. Play the Random game: Illustrate a random word (every day)
7. Look for inspiration in Flickr interesting photos
8. Try something new (HDR, panorama, macro, flash, etc.)
9. Don’t shoot any photos, come back to old ones
10. Stop procrastinating
11. Help your fellow photographers

The second one has been found by a bird photographer who started to be bored. He decided to aim at shooting photos of 1000 different bird species. Feasible, But not so easy. His web site: 1000birds.com.