wedding book prices

Hi, I'm doing my 5th wedding next week, (all booked in the last 2 months) and it's funny I'm more 'nervous' now than my 1st one. I guess the 1st one was for friends I felt little pressure, it was a beautiful sunny day the marriage was a small affair and very informal so everything turned out great. Now I have some experience and my last one could have been a disaster as I made a mistake and put some discharged batteries in my pocket rather than the ones I had diligently charged the night before. Convinced there was something wrong with my camera (and no second body!) Blind panic stopped me from calmly dealing with the problem - I had a second shooter, thank god.
Now, I have a check-list and do it twice once the night before and ten again on the morning ( and a second camera!)
I charged £250.00 for the 1st 2 which covered my costs and a little bi but not my time a wedding takes me about 3 days)The next 2at £400 (these have built a portfolio) and now any others will be based on the 'package they want

I use Loxley Colour, average album cost seems to be about £250-£300 depending on how many pages you want.

Service from them has been superb, always do what they say they will, and the quality of the products are excellent.

I've tried to use an 'Italian Company', but they were a disaster from the get go...

The wedding shoot took 12 hours and was very successful. Popping Flash not withstanding
The bride's Dad couldn't stop telling me how impressed everyone was!
The pictures are Ok. I'm not totally happy obviously! but the couple are, and I managed some beauties up on the Hoe when the weather broke.

Now... my problem... Blurb... Arrrgggg.
I discovered rather too late that it uses sRGB and doesn't follow colour profiles.
I then discovered that the software doesn't 'snap to grid' (despite offering to) or offer input of sizes for image blocks.
I also can't find a template without text. It is starting to drive me nuts! I'm used to InDesign and complete freedom, but Blurb would expect me to rasterise my pages and drop them into its software.
Does anyone have any advice or templates for Blurb 2?

I used blurb for one of my books and went for the simple black background and one or two photos per page. If I didn't want text I just left the box empty. The colour on the majority of the photos came out well without a profile.

Personally I found it easy and the results good, but then I was after a very simple design.

Cheers, Kris.

Thanks Kris.
I have discovered that you can use InDesign and PDF the whole thing as CMYK thus removing at least one colour shift in the process.

I found that leaving text out of their text-based designs left the page unbalanced. I can't figure out why they don't offer a book just for photos - that must be the majority of their work surely?

Using InDesign is going to take forever tho'. I would normally be paid for at least a week's work to make a professional book, but I budgeted for this simple wedding book to be a drag and drop job and take a quarter of the time using the Blurb software. I MUST be missing something?

Incidentally, the money for your lens is coming directly from finishing this book so I could really do with getting it out of the way swiftly.

The template I chose (simple black background photo book) had the choice of various picture layouts the first two of which were full page photo (no border) and full page with a border. No text with either.

Cheers, Kris.

I think that this is cheap - my wife pays more for insuring her £1000 pound horse simply to protect her against public liability when riding on the road plus vets fees - i think she pays about 280 pa


Oh and well done for giving it a go - it takes guts to do a wedding - well done and i hope it works out ok overall