On the 12th of August my photo of beautiful Moraine Lake was at the frontpage. Click here to open this page.

To make it even better they had also chosen a photo from Wendy, so we are on the same page

What is climate change?
Climate change is something the has always been around, as long as the earth exists. In the past there have been several ice ages. In the history of the earth cooler periodes are followed by warmer ones. This is nothing out of the ordinary, scientists agree with that.

Research shows that there is a close relation between the average temperature and the amount of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere. This is because CO2 traps heat from the sun which causes the temperature to rise.

Over the last 650 thousand years this system was in balance with high and low temperatures. The last decades show an extreme rise in the amount of CO2. This has never been seen over the period mentioned. This rise started when mankind began the industrial revolution. This change will have severe consequences if we do nothing.

The film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ by Al Gore explains all this in a clear way. It shows what is happening today and what will happen in the future because of global warming. I can recommend this film, if you haven’t already seen it.

Today is the release of a new film about climate change. It is ‘The 11th Hour’ by Leonardo DiCaprio. Where ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ talks about consequences of our actions, this movie gives solutions for solving the problem.

What can we do about it?
I think that ‘The 11th Hour’ will be very interesting to watch. But you do not have to wait for that, because you can do something rigth now. And it is actually very easy as well!

I have flown from The Netherlands to Canada this year. Flying is one of the biggest sources of CO2. I compensate by supporting Greenseat. You can also compensate for CO2 emissions caused by driving your car, using natural gas and electricity with Climate neutral.

All of the above combined only costs me 7 euros per month! This money is invested in projects that reduce greenhouse gases by growing new trees. If you think that all this talk about climate change is bogus, well just buy those trees to make the world a greener place

If you want more information, go here.

I chose myphotobook to print it. It is a German company, but all Europeans can order their book there.

What do they offer?
Mostly all companies, where you can print your photobook, give you their own software to create the book. But almost none of them have software for the Mac. I think that is strange, because the Mac is a great tool to work with your photos.

I was very happy that myphotobook does have a Mac version of their software. So reason enough for me to see what they have to offer. And that is a lot! You can choose different types of binding, like stapled, paperback or hardcover and spiral binding.
Furthermore, their book can have more pages than any other company I have checked. If you choose for a book of 20×27 centimeters, like I did, your book can be up to 144 pages. My book has 96 pages.

The layout of the pages is completely up to you. The program gives several default templates to give you a start, but you can change them and save for further use. What I particularly like is the ability to stretch a photo across two pages! This way, you can enlarge your photos to 40×27 centimeters.

Is the software any good?
The software works reasonably well, for the most part. But there are a few bugs that need to be sorted out. I have had to teach myself to regularly save the book, because it happened to me a few times that the program suddenly stopped. This is a bad thing, but with the precaution of regular saving this wasn’t a problem for me anymore.

There is also a bug when you are typing. If the text you are typing is to long for the textbox, you are not able to correct this other than closing the textbox and re-typing it.

When you are satisfied with the endresult of your book you can send it over the internet. My book was about 350 MB. When I tried sending it, the program crashed two times. Luckily it is smart enough to see where it has to continue sending, so you don’t have to send everything for a second time.

Is the book any good?
It took about two weeks before I could hold the book in my own hands. Some of the photos could have been a little sharper and a few are a bit on the yellow side. But most photos have the same colors when I view them on my monitor. For the best results you need a calibrated monitor and save the files as sRGB.
The book itself has a heavy hardcover and its weight is almost 800 gram. Overall this is a high quality book.

In the beginning of this post I told you that I am a perfectionist. It was exciting and it has cost me a lot of time, but I am very happy with the endresult! If you are looking for a good photobook printer then I would suggest that you try myphotobook. My next photobook will most certainly be printed by them!

The other Canada photos can be found here:
canada-2006

Because of some technical issues, not all the pages are completely translated. I am working to correct this.

If you want more information about the plugin I used please have a look on this page: http://fredfred.net/skriker/index.php/polyglot