Printing Your Own Business Cards and Book Marks

Since this belongs to a Photography Blog, I feel that I should at least insert a few pretty ordinary pictures even if I am going to discuss printing your own business cards and bookmarks.

On Friday night the moon was at its closest distance to earth (4 hours after perigee) when it sis 14% bigger and 30% brighter at 5:00pm EST Dec 12. I had planned to be out at sunset to take images but got distracted with the constant cleaning up we are doing with some construction work that’s still ongoing. It was to take a week and now we are entering our 4th week of dust, dust and more dust.

When I went out to get the paper this morning, the moon was just starting to disappear over the western horizon and I remembered the perigee thing and grabbed my camera to capture a few images.


There were crows flying past the moon but not exactly where they are now. I combined 2 other images and placed the birds where I thought they would have good effect. Since the light was changing I used the curves tools and eyedropper to ensure that the blue around the birds where identical to the background. I set one control point to background and the other on the blue near bird. I then used a curve adjustment layer and tweaked individual the Red/Green/Blue channels to match the numbers on the background. The reason I did it with this method is that with the moving birds there is a bit of blur near edges and it is difficult to extract just the dark parts without picking up a bit of the background colour at the edges. This approach will give you a perfect match. The contrast of the moon was increased slightly. The sun is just striking the treetops and giving it a red glow.


This was taken a few minutes earlier at a faster shutter speed.


Making Cards and Finding a Good Case




If you own Nikon equipment then there are these beautiful stainless steel cases made for Nikon eyeglasses that come with a cleaning cloth. They make perfect business card holders. These were given to me but I am sure that any higher end optical glass wear stores might give or sell them cheaply to you.

I am surprised that they don’t come with the purchase of a high end Nikon camera.

I use Photoshop to make and print my own business cards on semi-gloss photo paper, as I like the feel and look of these cards. The only problem is that I can’t print on the back.

I create a Photoshop layered file with several images and a different layer for the different fonts and word colours. I also create a thin black border that will form a cutting guide for each of the cards.


I then create a picture package under the automated command and create a template that reduces each photo to a 2.5” x 3” card and places 8 cards on an 8x10” sheet.


The master file has several images that I use so I can create various versions. See image below where I have combined them.


I use a sharp drywall utility knife and a metal edged ruler to cut out each card along the black lines. This is a bit labour intensive but I do like the quality of each card.

Now the Shameless part

Whenever I am in a magazine store reading photography magazines and I notice another person who seems interested in photography, I ask them if they read photography blogs and if the conversation continues I will ask them if they want a card to my site and if nothing else it makes a good book mark.

Yesterday I was in a multi-goods store and there were some people looking at cameras. I spoke to them to see if they need any help with camera selection and afterwards handed out one of my cards.

I never hand these out without having some dialogue with the person and I also determine first if they are interested in reading Photography blogs.



Larger Bookmarks



I also print vivid landscapes and cut them into strips and laminate them, yellow represents the clear plastic, and I hand these out to friends as 8” long bookmarks.

Easy to make Christmas or any type of gift for people whom like to read books. These have no advertising on them.














Niels Henriksen