Trade Tricks: A Personal Photo Book

Now that archival-quality, large-format prints cost only a few dollars and can be produced quickly, I find myself creating many more prints than I’m able to frame and display. The cost of framing prints hasn’t declined, nor do I have much wall space left in my home to display my newly printed images.

One alternative to this dilemma is to store the large prints in boxes or large envelopes. This method is unsatisfactory, however, as the prints sit in a closet or drawer, making it inconvenient to share photographs with friends and family. Also, when I do take the images out of the box, they can get damaged as they’re shown and passed around.

So I searched for a better way to store and display my photographs. While browsing through the Light Impressions catalog, I saw a solution to these problems. Light Impressions manufactures a product called the Big Book, a very large photo album. Its dimensions are 25x20x11/4-inches, with the pages measuring 191/2x24 inches, making the pages large enough to hold a full-sized newspaper page. The book is made of acid-free, archival-quality materials. Two 11x17-inch prints (or one 13x19-inch print) may be mounted on one side of one page.

The scrapbook comes with 25 pages, which may be increased to 50 pages using the Big Book refill kit—an astounding total of 200 11x17-inch images (or 100 13x19 images) may be stored and displayed in the Big Book. I can write captions or relevant information on the spaces in between the photographs on the page. Light Impressions also offers the ability to personalize your Big Book with a line of up to 22 characters printed on the front.