I remembered reading a great post by Gavin Gough about “Chasing his mojo” in Hanoi’s old quarter a year or so back and a city that could offer me a chance to re-find mine – to reconnect photographically – was an exciting prospect.

Granted it is winter here and “Tet” and so the city might not proffer some of the photographic treats it has shared with others so readily, but I was very surprised.

Hanoi is no longer a city of bicycles lazily propped up against a fading yellow wall or being ridden by school children wearing the traditional white Ao Dai. Indeed on my walk this morning I counted the bicycles I saw. Four. Hanoi – even its charming old quarter – is a city over-run with new scooters, BMW’s, Range Rover and other luxury cars.

When you do see the charismatic figure of a conical hatted woman shuffling under the weight of their Quang Gang, before you can consider taking a picture, they have stopped, put down their baskets and approached you for $1.

On the first day here I thought that perhaps it was me – that perhaps I had lost my “mojo”. I thought perhaps that I wasn’t slowing down enough or being observant enough. Perhaps I was trying to hard or had too high expectations.

Perhaps. But having now gone out in all weathers (the sun finally broke through after 2 days of cold damp drizzling rain) and all hours, Hanoi’s sold quarter seems all too similar to many other South East Asian cities where the price of advancement has been scarified at the alter of culture.

Has Hanoi’s old quarter lost some of its own Mojo?

Maybe. But scratch the surface a little harder and some of that charm and opportunity can still be found.

Granted it is not as easy as it used to be. Pictures of the wonderful old architecture will have the multiple trailing telephone and electricity hours strung right through the middle of it. But the pople are as charming as ever, the markets as vibrant as ever and the streets as colorful as ever. You just have to watch your backdrop, frame your images more carefully and get in close.

There are a host of different on-demand digital publishing houses out there and all offer very similar services. There is however a vast difference in quality, price per book, distribution and shipping costs.

After some extensive research I chose Blurb.com to publish my first book. I chose Blurb for three main reasons:

1. The quality of the paper and colour reproduction of the photogrpahs is by far the the best. For photographers that true colour representation really matters. I would argue that is probably the one and only comment you need to know and the other on-demand digital publishers are therefore second best. However there is “nowt as queer as folk” as we say in England, so the rest of this post may be of use to others with different priorities.

2. My second reason was their software. It is by far and away the most, intuitive, flexible and sophisticated. There is the additional option now of designing your book using your own package rather than their software and then uploading a pdf. For those of us happy with Adobe InDesign, they even provide templates. Matt Brandon’s amazing book Catchlight went straight to the top of Blurb’s bestsellers – it will really encourage you to get out there and get publishing!

3. My third reason was flexibility over the book size. Ony blurb offers you the really large book size with a choice of dustjacket or photo-imprint hardcover and the ability to use my own “Publishing House” logo to make it look like my company – rather than Blurb that published the book. I have to say that the finished article is amazing in terms of production quality.

There are only 2 real downsides with Blurb.com at the moment:

1. Their distribution costs are a little expensive. If you are trying to make money out of your books, then opting for a slightly smaller size or less pages really helps to keep the cost down, but in this case I wanted a great gift for those on the trip and so the size of the book, the number of pages, the type of paper (I selected premium paper) was more important than the overall cost.

2.Secondly they don’t currently offer an ISBN option – whereas Lulu.com does. This means that if you publish your book through Lulu.com (using their logos and distribution service etc) then they will get it placed in Barnes&Noble.com, Amazon.com etc – all the big online retailers. At the moment you can still sell your book and make money from it on Blurb.com, but it does not have an ISBN, so anyone looking to order through Amazon or their local bookstore won’t be able to find it.

Anyway, I am thrilled with my book and it has been a great way to check out the service blurb.com offers for the books that I really want to spend some time on in the future. It is not meant to be a portfolio of great photos, but a momento of a recent trip down the Nile from Luxor to Aswan where the focus was on time with the family rather than behind the lens, so really it is a mixture of snaps and the odd decent photo. You’re welcome to have a look (or even buy a copy if you really want to). You can check it out here. I’ve now started putting together my first proper photo book of images taken around Islaamic Cairo….