Print photo books from Flickr…

Awhile back I wrote about the surprise book and poster I received in the mail from Flickr – and now the service that lets you print your photos to a book/poster is live (beta). $15.95 for a perfect-bound book or $9.99 for a poster. For the books you can do all photos, sets and by date. There are lots of options for layout too- could make a nice gift. Link.
Interesting photo and possible background of one of the earliest photos? – One summer day in France in 1826, Joseph Niepce took the world’s first photograph. It’s a photo of some farm buildings and the sky. It took an exposure time of 8 hours. Voila! It had to feel pretty incredible, like magic. 
$77, not bad – Who this is for: You: owner of a small design company, a seat-of-your-pants freelancer, or perhaps an under-appreciated intern in the marketing staff of a big corporation. You wish to improve what you can offer photographically for your projects, you might only own a mid-range consumer digital camera. Read on, this article is intended as a helpful starting point.
Nice hack for duping slides- I started this because I have about 2000 35mm slides and nearly that many color negatives I’d like to convert to digital images, and many of them are 30 years old or more and starting to deteriorate. My first attempt involved purchasing a slide scanner from the-store-that-must-not-be-named, but it took like 3 to 4 minutes to prescan and then scan to file, and then it usually botched the exposure or the color balance. I realized that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life scanning slides in this manner, so I started thinking about other solutions…[
