My fellow Fuji Guy Dale recently got married. I went to the wedding and took my trusty “pocket-rocket” X30 and took some shots from the pews where I was sat. I was hardly shooting the wedding, but it still made for a fairly interesting series of shots as the story of the traditional British Christian wedding ceremony unfolded in front of me.
Like most of the images I take for personal use, they ended up in a gallery on my Facebook wall for friends to see. But I wanted to do something a little bit more. This is where Pop Book came in…
Now I know this sounds like your usual sales pitch but it really isn’t. I heard about Pop Books from my colleagues in our printing team. For the small fee of £4.99, I was able to take 21 of my favourite images and compile them into this little cute photobook to give to Dale and his new wife as a little gift and token of my gratitude for being invited to share their day.
How does it work?
I’m pretty sure that Pop Books are mostly aimed at smartphone photographers (nothing wrong with that!) because you can only create a Pop Book by using an App for Android or Apple devices.
Once you’ve installed the App you get started by tapping “Create your POP BOOK”. You then need to choose where to get your images from. You can either browse your device, or choose either Facebook or Instagram.
I chose Facebook, logged in as me, and then selected the images from my Facebook gallery. Once you have selected 21 images you can click “Create your POP BOOK” button again and this takes you to the final stage.
You can now double tap on any picture to Edit it. You can Crop, add an instagram-style filter and add text. You can also select either a white border of black border for each of your images
Finally you can change the order that the images will appear in.
And that’s it. Just create an account and go through the basket process, and “between 10-14 days” your Pop Book should be with you. In my case it was actually 4 days.
You even get a pretty cool viewer that allows you to see the book how it will appear. You can see my book for Dale here.
And here’s the final result
…and with a shiny English pound for scale:
Tips
If you know you’re shooting for a Pop Book, set your camera to 1 : 1 ratio to help compose your shots and save any post process cropping.
You need exactly 21 images to make a Pop Book. No more. No less. Make sure you have your 21 images ready to go before you start the process as it makes it smoother. In my case, it turned out that I didn’t actually take 21 different images that I was happy with so I had to get creative with the crops to make a few very similar shots have very different final looks. It really helps to go into this thing knowing you need 21 images to start with!
Damien Lovegrove left his role as a cameraman and lighting director at the BBC back in 1998 after 14 successful years to create the renowned Lovegrove Weddings partnership with his wife Julie. Together they shot over 400 top weddings for discerning clients worldwide. In 2008 Damien turned his hand to shooting beauty and portraiture and has since amassed a dedicated following for his distinctive art. Damien now divides his time between teaching the next generation of photographers and photographing personal projects. His book 
David Cleland is a landscape and reportage photographer based in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
MacLean Photographic was founded in 1996 and takes its name from owner Jeff Carter’s full name – Jeffrey Stuart MacLean Carter.
Kevin is pure documentary wedding photographer. He started shooting weddings professionally in 2008 and since then has photographed weddings right across the UK and Europe. Shooting in a documentary style he strives to tell the story of the wedding through photojournalism, rather than “traditional” contrived wedding photography.
Kerry is an award winning fine art equestrian photographer, shooting commissions across the UK and worldwide. Her work has also been published in a number of UK and international magazines, websites and blogs. Kerry was also the first female UK photographer to be named as a Fuji X-Photographer, joining a group of brand ambassadors worldwide.
Matt is a black & white street and event Photographer based in Liverpool, England.
For me photography has been a life long passion , I got my first a square 35mm box tammy camera at the age of nine and and have been shooting ever since.
