This is a major part of what I am offering.

"A picture is worth a thousand words", as they always say, but images do far more than just replace those thousand words.

They liven everything up and so enhance all the words next to them.

We can all remember being kids, when we first started reading. Our eyes rushed to the pictures and a book without masses of half-decent pictures in it was ... well ... "boring" and therefore dropped by us for something that did have pictures in it.

However old we are, we're still all kids at heart: we just have differing thicknesses of "adult veneers" on us depending on whom we're with, and there is absolutely no good reason, other than perhaps cost, why books need to be page after page of endless text with no pictorial relief whatsoever.

Let us, therefore, appeal to the child in all our future readers and really delight their eyes!

But, I hear you ask yourself, why employ someone else to take photos for you when almost every single smartphone nowadays is capable of taking really good photos?

That's a very good question so let me answer it.

Over the last few years I have bought a lot of up-to-date, professional and semi-professional digital photographic equipment and corresponding top-quality, industry-standard software. I have also invested in several years' worth of weekly, one-to-one, two-to-three-hour tuition sessions here at my home from a very experienced, highly knowledgeable and very competent professional photographer. His tuition is on-going, too, as there is just so much more fascinating stuff to learn.

Two very important things that I have picked up from him are that (a) there are a great many ways of taking a photo and then, critically important for the quality and visual effect of the final image, (b) an almost infinte number of ways of "enhancing" or "editing" that photo afterwards.

Let me tell you why the resolution of images is so important.

Printed books normally only need images to have a maximum resolution of 300 dpi (dots per inch), unless the objects are really very small. Websites can often cope with lower resolutions (so far fewer pixel-equivalents) than that, and this results in smaller file sizes, which, in turn, then help the pages to load much quicker.

I have cameras that enable me to take very high resolution "raw" shots.

"Raw Image Files" retain almost all of the information that the lenses bring to the camera's sensor, meaning that the all-important optical data in the file have only "suffered from" minimal data processing. This, in turn, allows me to do a lot with the photos once they have been taken, something that is rarely possible with photos that have been taken on cameras that cannot take raw photos.

It also means that we avoid all of the damage to the optical data caused by the high compression ratios typically found in photos taken or stored as "JPEGs". Raw photos do not degrade (lose optical data) each time they are saved.

I use studio photographic lamps with daylight bulbs in them and normally take all my photos of objects with my cameras fixed to different tripods. This enables me to take photos of objects with far greater accuracy and either far more, or sometimes on purpose, far less depth of field.

Depth of field is very important for showing as much detail of the object as possible and especially in the shadows. However, there are times when it is really helpful to blur out the foreground or background, as this highlights the object very much better.

I also use a remote control shutter-release in order to avoid all camera-shake.

The whole idea is to make sure that any recently-taken photos that you want to include in your book are of the very best possible quality and do their proper job of really bringing your words to life.

There is no percentage whatsoever in having bad, recently-taken photos in your book.

I will touch on what to do with "old" photos on the next page.