yesterday i received the printed version of my sofobomo book from print. i had been really curious about the quality, especially the rendering of the difficult, so i thought, darker regions. in this respect there is hardly a fault to find. problems however arise in two other aspects: colors, especially red and blue, come out definitely more vivid than on my calibrated monitor, and fine structures like sand on the beach or a fishing net suffer from the printing resolution. sometimes even in fine nuanced bright areas it seems that compression artifacts become visible. now i stop nitpicking, because i know only too well that i can definitely not expect steidl quality for a print-on-demand book in that price class. we always get what we pay for.

the positive experience of the first self-made book, where i did not resort to the pre-fabricated layouts of photobook making software, is simply unbeatable. and in this sense i have learned a lot in this year’s sofobomo, and i guess i’ll be in next year again. the image above was taken on the beach of batticaloa and is the back title of my book.