cleaning up

I’m cleaning out my workspace. And, while I’m doing it, I’m finding lots of stuff I want to get rid of. Cameras that I haven’t used in a long time. Meters I don’t use any more. A staggering amount of stuff that’s just plain trash.

I’d put off the big cleanup until I was done with SoFoBoMo. Not just done, but done done. And now I’m lifting my sights from the SoFoBoMo goal of getting my book done, and upward toward the horizon of where I want my photography to go in the next year. I’m looking at all those theatre photos, and I’m letting them percolate in my mind, in the hopes that something really good will brew up in there.

So yesterday I sold off the old dry mount press. It felt good, and here’s why – it breaks the chain. Sure, I could still make silver prints if I really wanted to – I just would have to cobble together some way to flatten them and mount them. I could hinge mount them, the way I do inkjet prints now, I guess. But although it might seem silly, getting rid of that big, heavy piece of equipment that looked like something from a 1957 B movie about monsters destroying Tokyo is a big step away from silver for me.

If I’ve got no dry mount press, I know in my heart that I’m not ever making more silver prints. And if I really know that, it means that big old enlarger – it should go too. The enlarging lenses. The enlarging timer. Print washers. There’s a lot of stuff that can go away, and enrich someone else’s life.

I’ve even pondered the idea of really getting rid of stuff – doing a Weston and destroying all those old negatives. Ok, maybe not the family photo negatives – but all the art stuff. Burn all the 45 negatives. I disconnected the scanner yesterday – and I’m thinking I’ll sell it. That sort of breaks the chain to all those 4×5 negatives – no way to scan them any more means I’ll never print them again. And I’m strangely OK with that. I guess I’ll keep the scanner, do a book of the meager quantity of 45 stuff I still like, and then get rid of it all except for the digital versions I need for the book.

This urge to declutter strikes me every once in a while – not just an urge to physically declutter but to inwardly declutter as well. The two don’t seem like they should be linked together but they are.

It’s time for a clean sweep and a fresh mind.

SoFoBoMo 2009 Fuzzy Window closing

In about 11 hours, the SoFoBoMo 2009 two month window closes here on the west coast of North America.

When the window closes, registration will close. There will be a week or so after the close to give folks a chance to work out any uploading quirks and get their PDF files uploaded, and then we’ll shut the upload off as well.

Right now there are 879 people registered. Rather to my surprise, there’s been a big rush of registrations in the last ten days – I don’t know if those were serious registrations or people joking, or people who are confused about when the whole thing wraps up.

Also, right now there are 188 books completed and uploaded. I know there are a few books which have been completed but which aren’t uploaded for various reasons. That’s ok – you don’t have to upload your book, although it’s more fun if you do. And if there are folks out there who don’t want to share, or don’t want to share the whole book (for whatever reason), you might consider uploading a ‘placeholder’ PDF, which will let us know that you finished but don’t want to share your book. I guess next year we’ll have some check box to indicate that you’ve finished but don’t want to upload, but for now even just a single page PDF would serve the same purpose.

I expect that we’ll see a rush of uploads in the next few days as the surge of last minute finishers manage to upload.

Yes, there will be another SoFoBoMo. And, of course, there will be some improvements. If you have suggestions, feel free to leave comments on this post or send me email.

One interesting observation: last year we had 170 participants and 60 finished books. This year we’ve got more than 5 times the participants and more than 3 times as many books finished. I wonder what things will be like next year.

A few SoFoBoMo observations

On May 1, 2009 at 6:42am Pacific time, there were 588 people registered for this SoFoBoMo 2009. I just checked. Right now, there are 846 people registered. That means (to my surprise) that 30% of the people who have registered (so far) registered AFTER the start of the two month window. Interesting, eh?

That total of 846 registrants (so far) is almost exactly 5 times as many as last year. And to think that on April 1, I jokingly predicted that we might get three times as many registrants as before.

So far, there are 148 books uploaded to the website. I don’t think we’re going to get 5 times as many books as last year’s tally (which was 60). Beyond that I’m not insane enough to attempt to project how many books will be finished and uploaded.

Some observations:

1. As I predicted, a lot of the people who planned on using Booksmart (the software you get for free from Blurb.com) discovered, to their horror, that Booksmart watermarks proofs that you print, thus making it really really hard to generate a clean PDF to upload for SoFoBoMo. Some of them have just gone ahead and uploaded that watermarked PDF, which I think is fine even though it’s perhaps stretching things a bit. Some of them have discovered this problem, and just given up, which I think is disappointing. But the whole business points out the value to working out the details of your workflow in advance of starting your month.

2. So far I’ve seen books assembled with Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, Microsoft Publisher, Adobe InDesign, the free Scribus, Photoshop – and that’s just the toolsets I know about.

3. The 15MB limit on PDF size for upload caused some consternation as people came up against that limit. Some thinking will have to be done for next year about better ways to handle that.

4. Reading the blog stream, I have been struck by a) how many people thought it was easy, and b) how many people found it too hard. There’s a definite skill set to getting a book done.

5. I observe that some people who finished last year and registered this year have not finished books this year. Despite the ’skill set’ observation above, doing a book remains hard. If things do not click, it can be really hard.

6. There are people who have participated twice now, and who have announced already that they will participate next time around.

Got thoughts or observations on this stuff? Comments welcome…

PDF to Blurb

Sure, in the past you could load your PDF into Photoshop, crank out jpgs for each page, and then load those jpgs full bleed onto pages in Booksmart, and get a book printed on Blurb that way. I’ve done it – I did it with my SoFoBoMo book last year. It works. I had trouble with loading the jpgs, and had to drag the individual page images into Booksmart one by one, and my hands hurt for two days.

But this looks more interesting. I haven’t even read everything, but it claims to be a way to generate your PDF, and then pass it directly off to Blurb for printing.

I’ll be trying it. If you try it, let me know how it works.

Expectations

It’s been a while since my last post – I was off again, down in Ashland, OR at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Disregarding a day spent on travel, it worked out to six days and 9 plays – enough to more than keep me busy.

Just before I left, I was struck by a connection between this post by Colin Jago, and this post by Anita Jesse. I’ve been musing on the connection between them ever since.

Colin is writing on how our photography can turn, sometimes without our realizing it and often quite against our will, into a relentless and not very gratifying push for the next ‘keeper’.

Colin writes:

One aspect of this question that I think needs more prominence is that there is an audience somewhere for almost anything. If what you want is a wow reaction then you have got to go on putting the work out there until you find your audience. This is the great success of Flickr and similar sites – they are very good at connecting people with audiences. It is very easy, as a viewer, to work outwards from some random link towards work that you value. But the corollary of there being some audience for any work is that not everyone is going to like everything. You can’t please all of the people all of the time.

If we assume ‘people’ mean strangers for the moment (producing stuff for family or close friends is different), it is interesting to think why it is that we get a buzz from the praise of a small group of random strangers. I have to feel that this is something piggy-backing on a genetic trait that evolved for other reasons.

It is very easy, as Guy describes, to let this praise become a driver that sucks the goodness out of the experience as a whole.

There’s more there, and I urge you to go and read all of what Colin wrote, and punch through his links into what Guy Tal wrote.

What Guy and Colin are describing, I have felt happening to me in the past year – a shift in my goal away from using photography as a tool to figure things out and into a search for keepers. It’s something I’ve resisted, because it’s a place I’ve been before. I read Guy’s words, and Colin’s words, and boy, howdy, I know exactly what they’re talking about.

Which brings me to Anita Jesse’s post, where she wrote:

Today, I finally let go of the images in my mind and took photographs of the poppies we have: windblown poppies on a June day when the temperature probably never made it to 65 degrees. I experimented with 1/2500 shutter speed to see if I could get anything; and, even though I moved very little, the wind was blowing fast enough that I got several compositions within a few seconds. I ended up with one that was surprisingly sharp; but, in the end, it is the softness of this frame that feels right to me. Not the poppies I was waiting for, but the poppies I was offered.

Anita, I think, has found a key. The key lies in controlling our expectations. When we head out with certain expectations, it’s because we’ve planned in advance what we hope to get and we want those photographs, not the ones that are actually there. And in reality, we don’t want the poppies we were waiting for. What we really want is both the experience of finding the poppies we’re offered, and the keepers that we find that way.

I have a little story on those lines. Years ago, now, I’d arranged to photograph on the WA coast. Because I was rendezvousing with a friend who I rarely got to see, I looked forward to that trip with eager anticipation, and in my mind I saw us happily photographing on the coast, with wild waves and dramatic spray as the surf erupted off the rocks in towering geysers, and a sky filled with dramatic yet friendly Ansel Adams clouds. And, of course, when we got to the coast, the scene was of quiet surf, no dramatic spray, and not only no Ansel Adams Clouds, but solid overcast supplemented with heavy fog.

We wandered, disconsolate, up the beach, and then back, and I found nothing to photograph. I think I made two exposures – two exposures, on a hike along one of the sections of the WA coastline that I now think is one of the most photographable places on the planet. At the end of our walk, we wandered past some trees, and I lamented that it was so foggy, even the light on the trees was horrid.

About a week after that trip, I dreamed I was back on that beach. In the dream, instead of walking up the beach hoping for a sunbreak, I wandered into the trees – a small grove of trees bleached by the surf and twisted by wind, and the entire grove filled with drifting fog. In the dream, I got out the camera, and exposed every sheet of film I had. In the dream, I went back to the car for more film – twice. In the dream, when I got home, I processed the film, and had dazzling moody photographs of fog drifting through the trees. I had never seen photos like these before, but they took my breath away.

The paradoxes are these: that pursuing our expectations in the name of getting the next ‘keeper’ not only destroys our enjoyment and satisfaction, but also somehow precludes us from seeing the keepers we’re offered. Letting go of our expectations does the opposite. And, frustratingly, knowing these things does not make it easier to head out and photograph the poppies we’re offered instead of the ones we thought we wanted and were waiting for.

Craft and technology

Colin Jago has some interesting points in response to my Kindle post. Colin writes (in part)

Printing used to be a craft. Ignore for the moment the old question of whether printing was also an art, for it most certainly was a craft regardless of that. It was something to get good at through practice and effort. And, do you know what, it still is. Yet, unlike the traditional wet darkroom, it is also very much a big business technology change driven occupation. That means that innovations are likely to sweep though the business regularly. A good thing, yes, but the downside is that change writes off our personal time investment in existing technologies. It might also mean that fewer people persist with any given technology to perfect and stretch it.

It isn’t that fanciful to imagine a time in the near future when people are trading the last ink cartridges and maintaining stocks of old fashioned rag papers just like they now do for dye transfer materials. The difference being that such changes will happen multiple times per lifetime.

Where does that leave the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to learn to do something well?

I’ve spent, over the course of my life, an awful lot of time in various darkrooms. I doubt I’ve hit the 10 kilohour mark, but there was a time when I could produce pretty nice prints in the wet darkroom.

Some of the skills I acquired during that time had to do with physical mastery of darkroom tools. I learned how to burn and dodge without leaving obvious trails. I learned how to develop film and prints with consistency. I learned how to control the temperature of things with great reliability and precision. But those physical skills were, in the end, not the hard part of making good prints.

If I can draw on an analogy I like, those skills are to first rate printing in a wet darkroom as knowing how to use the steering wheel, accelerator, and brake are to a successful road trip. They’re skills that are necessary, but not sufficient. Unless you can control the car, you can’t travel by auto successfully. The big problem to be faced with travel by automobile, though, is not knowing how to drive, it’s knowing where you want to go. Anyone can learn to drive and then drive around in the US. It takes Charles Kuralt to drive around the US, find compelling stories in the lives of ordinary people, and present them in a way that changed the people’s understanding of the world they lived in.

And so it was with printing in the darkroom. The understanding of the physical principles needed can be taught quickly. The problem in the wet darkroom is, in the end, not a matter of knowing how to get what you want. It’s being good at knowing what you want, and being sufficiently open to serendipitous discovery that you aren’t just a machine whacking out yet another full range print each and every time.

So, not only did I learn the physical skills needed in the wet darkroom, but I also learned some about what I can only call “thinking about images”. By this I don’t mean thinking about images in some philosophic sense, but more a matter of thinking about images in the sense that I understand how to visualize different ways an image can be presented, and can more or less articulate a goal for how I want an image to look when I print it. Once you get there (and some of the process of working that out inevitably involves some experimentation), then it’s a matter of figuring out how to get a reasonable approximation of that to appear on the paper when you run it through the tray line.

That skill, which I think is the real craft part of darkroom work, came along with me when I transitioned from printing in the wet darkroom and into the world of digital printing. I already knew how to think of regions of a print in terms of density and contrast. I was already familiar with the idea of print tone and how it could be used to get the right ‘feel’ in a print. I knew about balance and tonal weight, and I knew quite a lot about how to trick the human visual system into certain responses (like ‘wet’ or ‘curved’) when I wanted. So my transition into digital printing was largely a matter of learning how to control density and contrast with new tools. The basic problem to be confronted had not changed – it was just a different tool set, and a display material with different properties.

So I guess my point is that the transition to digital printing didn’t suddenly put me on an even footing with someone just learning to print. It didn’t start me over with a new 10K hour counter set to zero. Some part of those long hours in a small room lit with a dim red bulb counted, in some very important way, toward the 10K hours that it will take me to become an maker of outstanding inkjet prints.

And so, I think, with the inevitable shift from inkjet printing to whatever comes along and displaces that. Photo Kindles do not magically take raw files and turn them into expressive photo displays. Humans do that, and I very much suspect that the skills needed are more or less independent of display medium. Not completely – not quite completely. But very close.

Too Much

With the photos of the Paramount Theatre and Jones Playhouse, I discovered, rather to my surprise, that I had LOTS of photos to include in my SoFoBoMo book. Too many photos, in fact. In order to cut the book down to some reasonable size that I’d have a hope of getting under the 15MB limit, I’d have to cut an awful lot of photos.

That’s ok. I whacked the book in half – and now I have TWO sofobomo books. I did this, and I was feeling pretty chuffed. The stuff from the first two theatres I’d photographed had been edited down pretty heavily, and at around 22-25 photos each, the book was just about the right size. I tweaked some text, rubbed the corners with a rag moistened with spit to shine it up a bit, and called it done. Whew – one book finished. The pressure was off.

This morning, I sat down to edit the second book, aka Part II. I’m scrolling through page after page of photos, and it suddenly occurs to me that I still have way too many photos. There I was, editing out photos I really liked, because I was again aiming for 20-25 photos of each theater. Now that’s an arbitrary goal, and I can change the goal as I please, but as a first cut I wanted to aim at that for a host of reasons, some of which I’d have trouble articulating. My son once commented that “Editing something you’ve written is hard, because every time you cut a sentence, it feels like you’re killing your own children.” That’s pretty close to how I felt.

I can see the book getting better, but it sure hurts to cut some of those photos. It’s not that they don’t belong, it’s that I finally have a sense of where I want the book to go, and these fine photos are not pushing that direction. It’s a weird feeling.

Kindle

When we travel, Paula and I almost never check bags. Not even on our 4 week trip to South America. Because of this desire to never check bags, we are pretty interested in things which make it easy to fit a lot of stuff (books, say) into not much space or weight. In the past, we were in the habit of buying a pile of books, jamming them into the bags, and then freeing up space by setting them free along our journey.

For the South America trip, however, we opted for an Amazon Kindle. Much has been written elsewhere about the physical properties of the Kindle, whether it’s a good deal cost wise, and so on. I’m not much interested in chiming in on that discussion.

One of the things that surprised us, though, was that we enjoyed reading books on the Kindle. We enjoyed it a lot. On a scale from 1 to 10, reading a mint hardback would be a 10. Reading a decent paperback would be a 5. Reading a bad paperback (crummy paper, smeary ink, small print, narrow margins and gutter) would be a 1. Reading a book on a Kindle is, to my surprise, somewhere around an 8.5 or 9. It’s not as good as a nicely bound fresh hardback, but it’s awfully darn close. One thing I like about the Kindle is that it’s excellent for reading while eating lunch or breakfast – turn a page by pushing a button (no worries about greasy fingerprints on pages), and no need to use weights to hold pages open when eating requires two hands.

Anyway, Paula and I now own TWO Kindles. They get pretty heavy use. We like them.

And they have me thinking about printing. I was stunned by how very ‘booky’ reading a novel on a Kindle is. Sure, the Kindle as it stands now is rotten at displaying photos. The Kindle 2, though, is better at photos than the Kindle 1 was. And I expect that for any number N, Kindle N will be better for photos than Kindle N-1.

Furthermore, I expect that there exists some N, where Kindle N-1 is monochrome but Kindle N is color. And then we will have the same incremental improvement in quality, until a Kindle-like device can display photos as well as a paper print can. Sure, we’ll have surface quality issues, and resolution issues. But the trend is clear, and I suspect mostly any argument is going to center around “how long” and not “will it ever”.

And although we know that the arguments about the displays will be hot and furious, I’d observe that although inkjet prints ran into uber-religious resistance just a short while ago, they’re pretty much accepted without thought today. So I predict that having Kindle-like devices to display photos will hit the same complaints – “oh, I can see the dots”, “the gamut is too small”, “short print life” and so on, but eventually the technology will evolve until the new technology is better than the old stuff, and everyone will stop arguing and just use the new stuff. And inkjet printing will become an ‘alternative process’.

And I have to say that I’m looking forward to being able to have a device which can hold thousands and thousands of photographs, is half a centimeter thick, and can display the photos better than an inkjet print can – with no power drain except when switching photos. Bring it on, and faster, please.

Ghost Light

I’m certain that your theatre images would capture me and make me forget time; the pictures I have seen here have that power. Like the one in this post makes me thinking what’s going on. What is it and who put it there, and so on. I love it!

The subject of the photo in that post (and the photo in this one) is a ‘ghost light’ – a light that’s left on stage when a theatre is “dark” (that is, not currently being used). There are a slew of explanations of why ghost lights are left on 24/7, ranging from pedestrian (having the stage lighted, even if just by the one light, prevents accidents if someone happens to blunder onstage in the dark) to superstitious (the light is there to keep ghosts from taking up residence, or ghosts from performing plays, or the characters from past performances from returning to life on the stage, etc.) Most ghost lights are like this one – spartan and functional. This one was set upstage center, but it’s probably more traditional to set them further downstage, especially for proscenium theaters where there’s a drop off the edge of the stage.

One of the things Bill and I found in our adventures photographing in empty theatres is that the presence of the ghost light has a big impact on the feel of the space. Only one of the theatres we’ve photographed didn’t have a ghost light set when we photographed it (the first one, it turns out). Our plans are to rephotograph that particular theatre, and I expect when we do that we’ll ask them to leave the ghost light onstage.

Book Decisions

So, after adding a whole bunch of photos from yesterday’s session at the Jones Playhouse, I now have something like 117 pages in my SoFoBoMo book. That’s a wee bit long.

So I face a choice:

• edit things down way more tightly, making a smaller book
• Edit things down a bit more tightly, and make more than one book

I am leaning toward the latter.

And I can remember when people were discussing whether 35 images was too high as a minimum for a project done in a month.