Musings on Photography

To round out the day, I thought I would try yet another POD publisher - this time CreateSpace. The appealing thing about CreateSpace is that it appeared that I could tweak my InDesign book layout just a smidgen, and then just crank out a PDF and upload it, and be on my way.

It worked out almost that well. First, I had to create a book cover. I started out in InDesign but quickly hit the head-banging threshold. I gave up, and looked at the CreateSpace site again to see if there were any clues. I’m not too proud to look for help. Well, mostly not.

Anyway, CreateSpace had this cool feature that gave me an adjusted template (adjusted for the number of pages) as a .psd file. You download that file, load it into photoshop, and start laying your cover out over the top of the template. When you’re done, you turn off the template layer, have Photoshop save a PDF version, and you’re on your way.

It was a piece of cake; I just dropped the JPG versions of the cover that I’d cranked out for Blurb into the template, added a big black layer to give me color out past the bleed margin, and saved it all both as a PSD (so I can fix any mistakes) and as a PDF (to upload). Sweet.

And then I went, dropped the ISBN that CreateSpace gave me into my copyright page, and cranked out the PDF for the book block. And then uploaded it. Easy Peasy.

And then I submitted the whole thing for review. Presumably they’ll check to make sure I haven’t screwed it all up (I just thought of one possible mistake) and then I’ll be able to order a copy.

Apparently today is ‘International POD Publishers Do Things Which Greatly Annoy Paul Butzi Day”, on which all the POD publishers in the world attempt to provoke me into throwing a stroke by doing stupid things to annoy me. And not one of you warned me. Hmpf.

This morning, after fooling around with various ways to get from an InDesign document to something that can be force-fed into Blurb’s Booksmart software, I sat down to actually attempt to generate something I could order from Booksmart. Today was the day to, at long last, actually order a real printed book from SOMEONE, and for various reasons that someone was going to be Blurb.

It’s easy to get InDesign to render a book as full page jpgs. Well, it’s easy once you know how. Before that, it’s a bit of a mystery. But I’d figured that out, and armed with an InDesign book laid out to the dimensions specified by Blurb, I fired up InDesign and populated a folder with jpgs with names like page01.jpg, etc.

And then I fired up BookSmart. I will give you the complete story, with three part harmony, full orchestration, and a lot of feeling.

I understand why software like Booksmart exists. Really, I do. It exists because InDesign is too complicated, and asking someone to put together a book of their vacation to Epcot Center or Bermuda with InDesign is like asking someone “Will you please run down to the corner mailbox to mail a letter, and oh, by the way, would you mind using my Lockheed C-5a Galaxy strategic airlift jet?” I mean, InDesign is overkill for practically anything. And it’s expensive, too.

But still. People could lay out their books in Word, or Pages, or whatever tool they want, and generate PDFs which they upload. But when this is proposed, of course the techno guys at Blurb cover their ears and cry out in horror. People will get it all wrong. They’ll be mad because their books look like crud. They won’t pay. Blurb will go broke.

And so, what happens is that Blurb hires someone to write a simple layout tool like BookSmart. Limited feature set. Careful limits on what can be done. Templates. Handholding. The techno guys at Blurb no longer cry out in horror and shout “No, don’t do that, you’ll shoot your eye out, kid.” when they watch someone getting ready to upload stuff to Blurb to be printed.

Hey, they even have a (beta) version for the Mac, so I should be pleased, right? Wrong. Booksmart is bad.

My first intimation that my life with BookSmart was not going to be lovey-dovey was when I realized that it was not child’s play to get it to just let me cram pages into a book and plop images onto those pages. Oh, no, it took several abortive efforts before I got to that point. And then, when I had all of those files named ‘page001.jpg’ etc. imported into BookSmart, I had to plop them onto the pages one by one. And if that isn’t bad enough, I had to put up with some moron’s version of drag and drop, where I had to click once on an image to select it, and then click on it and drag it to the page, instead of just click and drag and drop. My carpal’ed out wrists started to protest even with the Apple Mighty Mouse in little plastic shards and the ergonomic mouse installed.

But in the end, I got it all done, and even think I got all the pages in and in the right order. It took me three tries with the cover, because it kept insisting that the ’subtitle’ field had too much text in it even though it was empty. In the end THAT problem turned out to be that the ‘title’ field on the cover had nothing in it but a single space. When I deleted that space, BookSmart stopped complaining. At this point, realizing that this was probably pretty buggy software, I started in praying in earnest.

But I did manage to upload the book to Blurb. And I ordered it, and I even paid the outrageous $10.92 for standard 5 day ground shipping. Hey, Blurb! I could ship a Lockheed C-5a Galaxy strategic airlift jet from where you are to where I am, overnight, for less than that. Be ashamed.

And then, after I successfully navigated through giving them billing and shipping addresses and such, and I’d ordered the book, I went back to BookSmart, to make sure I’d saved my work.

So I hit ‘file/save’ and Booksmart threw up this dialog, and I typed in a name, and BookSmart saved my work. But where, I pondered, had it saved it? It never asked me for a location. So I searched and searched, in vain, trying to find where the hell this worthless steaming pile of offal had saved my work. Because, you know, I wanted to make sure it would appear in my BACKUPS and stuff.

But no, I couldn’t find it. Not even harnessing the Magical Power of Spotlght Searching on my mac could reveal the location, because there were about 27 quadrillion things that came up when I searched for SoFoBoMo2008. So I created a new, empty book. And I saved it with a wildly improbable name that (ahem) made fun of the software developers at blurb in a particularly inappropriate way. And then I searched for THAT using Spotlight.

And I found it, and to my everlasting horror, I discovered where BookSmart had saved my work. Here is a little quiz - when BookSmart saves your work, does it save it in:

1. your Documents folder
2. on your desktop
3. your home directory
4. the BookSmart folder in the systemwide applications folder, which they’re not supposed to do

If you guessed #4, you’re right. That’s what it does. You’ve been warned. When BookSmart saves your work, and it doesn’t get picked up in your backup because no one backs up software they can just reinstall, don’t blame me. Blame the ignorant moron at Blurb who wrote the software. And if that happens to you, and you want a particularly inventive, vulgar, vitriolic curse to level at the morons responsible at Blurb, let me know. I’ve got a real dandy, and it’s only been used once. I’ll give you a special deal.

Now, it’s true that Blurb thoughtfully included a way for you to change this location. But if you’re working on, say, three different books, they all get saved in the new location. So I can’t have my SoFoBoMo 2008 book stored in one folder, along with the VioVio version and the Lulu version and whatever, and then have my Pacific Coast book in another folder entirely. No, that’s not allowed.

Honestly, I thought the software world moved away from this sort of microcephalic horsepucky with Dos 2.0. Apparently not at Blurb.

Asuka Books just annoyed the bejeebers out of me.

I hate businesses which have web sites, and the web sites do a pretty good job of telling me about their wares, but don’t spill all the beans, and then, when I have concluded that perhaps I’m interested in their product and want to know the price, they tell me “Hey, bub. We’ll tell you the price, but first you have to tell us a whole lot of stuff about yourself. Tell us where you live, and what your phone number is, and what you want to do, and how much experience you have, and how old you are. And then MAYBE we’ll tell you how much our products cost.”

I hate that. I hate it to pieces. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.

And Asuka Books does exactly that. To get at their God Damn Price List, you have to spend four minutes filling out their God Damn Application Form, and you have to prove that you’re sufficiently hoity-toity professional to do business with them, because They Refuse To Do Business With Consumers.

And they want to know your phone number, and your fax number, and an email address, and your web address, and a shipping address, and a billing address, and they insist that you verify your eligibility to do business with them.

And then, after I do all that crap (remember that I am just trying to get a peek at their God Damn Price List, here) they send me an email, saying that they’ll get around to turning on my account AFTER they’ve reviewed all the stuff I’ve told them, etc. etc. etc. And that they’ll send me an email approving my registration within two business days, which (because today is a Friday) presumably means that I’ll hear from them in the middle of next week.

I hate that. I hate it so much that when I discovered that I’d given all this information to Asuka Books, and they STILL weren’t going to let me see their damn price list for another four days, I made a very rude suggestion about what they might do to themselves, said suggestion involving a four meter length of rope, a garden rake, a battery powered electric drill, a one inch spade bit, a twelve volt car battery, two liters of saline solution, and a roll of duct tape. Oh, and a pint of honey and fifteen rabid rats. Because I really hate it when I give people all this information about me, and then they refuse to come across with their damn price list.

So here’s my reply to Asuka Book, in advance of their two business day process. Don’t bother. If you can’t see your way clear to telling me how much your damn products cost in less than four days, even after I drop my shorts and reveal everything about myself, even after I spend five minutes screwing around with your form, then I am pretty sure that you’re such a bunch of ignorant incompetents that I will never want to do business with you.

Asuka Books are free to run their business however they please. They can, if they want, refuse to do business with anyone who’s not a ‘professional’. They can, if they want, refuse to tell people how much their products cost until the potential customer fills out an application.

And I can do something I’ve never done before, which is to recommend that everyone just refuse to do business with Asuka Books, even though I don’t yet know how much their products cost, what the quality of their products might be like, and I’ve never done business with them.

Because why do business with someone who is intent on telling you they don’t want to make it easy for you? Life is just too damn short to put up with crap like that. If my life expectancy were five million years, it would STILL be too short do put up with crap like that.

And on second thought, make that 18 rabid rats.

Much of the photo time I’ve put in this week has been lost to the mind-bending whirl of POD options. Too many places to go to get books printed, too many size options, too many different ways to turn my InDesign book layout into whatever bolus of data each publisher wants uploaded to make the book.

And, naturally, although in my memory I was QUITE careful to pick a page size that matched the trim size of at least one of the options, it’s now abundantly clear that I screwed that bit up royally. And there are no common sizes switching from one outfit to another, at least as far as I can tell.

So now I am faced with adjusting the layout in ways both subtle and not so, to fit the page sizes available in various places, so that I can give each of of them a try. Or at least, right now I want to give several different places a try. Much more of this headbanging and I will surely just punt the entire enterprise and take up collecting the skeletons of small mammals that suffered from rabies instead.

And, as if it wasn’t enough hassle to go and adjust the page size and layout, when I switch to a different page size, I have to go through and generate new versions of the images. So I went through, and added a keyword to every PSD file. It took a long time, because Bridge is a horrible, slow, memory hogging nasty bit of software. And it’s hard to use, too. It’s slow and hard to use on a four core 3GHz Xeon machine with 8 GB of memory. I hate it. It’s slow and I hate it.

Anyway, the reason I was tagging all these files with keywords was to make it easy to generate new versions of the images, scaled to fit various book sizes. Sheesh.

I had this idyllic book printing fantasy thing going on, where I just sort of tweaked a few things, and in a few minutes I had a new version of the book in a different page size. Ha! Shattered dreams. Shattered into a million little jaggy pieces, all of them. Also included in this shattered fantasy thing I had going also included just uploading the PDF and not generating lots of jpgs and loading them into POD software that’s different for each POD vendor.

Fooey.

Two different posts on two different blogs caught my attention this morning:

On Frank Armstrong’s Pitchertakin’, I found this post particularly uplifting this morning. I can’t articulate why, but somehow the combination of that particular photograph and Frank’s writing about the new greens of spring and the mood of a drizzly day gave me a boost at the exact moment I really needed one.

And on Paul Lester’s blog, I found this post on Daily Practice to be interesting. I’m a fan of regular practice, not just because it keeps my photographic skill set sharp but also because it’s like meditation and seems to help me keep myself in that somewhat elusive happy equilibrium.

I’m not sure why it is, but it seems to be particularly helpful if, during my more or less daily practice, I try to tackle some problem or make some small advance on what I’ve done the previous day. Pondering on that this morning brought to mind an old, old John Hartford lyric from a song titled “Julia Belle Swain“:

Well, I come up the river the other night
darker than the inside of a cow
Ain’t nothin’ like a crooked old river
to straighten my head right out

Sometimes tackling problems is exactly what we don’t want to do, and the problem solving we’re forced to do just disrupts our lives. And sometimes we need small problems that are just at the right level of challenge, in which we can invest our attention, and solving those problems keeps us happy and stable. I don’t understand why that is, but you don’t need to understand why to put it to good use.

I’m still in the post-SoFoBoMo recovery, so I’m not quite up to speed yet.

Nevertheless, via Joe Reifer’s Ramblings about Photography, I found this very thought provoking post on Tony Fouhse’s tonyfoto/drool.

And here I must rant a bit about digital being “easy”. While it’s never really the machine that takes the photo (it’s the machines’ operator) digital makes it way more likely that just about anyone can come away with an image that’s, you know, properly exposed. Then don’t you just slap the file onto your computer screen and admire it for, like, 20 seconds before you hit NEXT, never really living with the image? But the way digital technology has made so much disposable, made the generation of photographs (and photographers) so easy (and so easy to delete, thereby erasing history) kind of bugs me.

Hmm. Sorry, I’m not buying any. I read/hear this complaint about ‘digital’ all the time, and to be honest, it always seems like complete bunkum to me.

Part of the problem is that I just don’t believe, even for a second, that we can really control how any eventual audience reacts to our work. We can control how WE react to the work, and that’s about it.

So when Fouse says “Then don’t you just slap the file onto your computer screen and admire it for, like, 20 seconds before you hit NEXT, never really living with the image”, he’s saying that for some bizarre reason, he can’t make himself do anything else. There’s nothing to prevent him leaving an image up on his screen for hours or days and interacting with it the way he’d interact with a print on the wall. There’s nothing to keep me from taking, say, a print of Ed Weston’s Pepper #30 and running it through a shredder, other than the fact that I like the print enough to hang it on the wall instead.

So all the argument about digital being ephemeral and ‘not real’ and ‘disposable’ is really more about our own attitudes, and not about the technology.

The part that really fails to stick for me is the idea that in order to make artmaking worthwhile, we must make the process hard. We must pay our dues, the reasoning goes, and we must make the process so difficult that we exclude the vast seething masses of wretched humanity from art-making. And I think that’s blowing smoke. I think it’s little more than some sort of guild behavior. If you’ve been reading here for long, you’ve probably come to realize that’s an attitude with which I vehemently disagree.

But interestingly, Fouhse continues:

Another reason why I’m planning on using the 4×5 is that it changes the ways you work. It slows things down. Each time I push the button it costs me 6 bucks (film and processing). Not that I’m gonna use that as an excuse to become (even more) anal. I’m just interested in using a different process, giving the old brain a workout.

I think it’s interesting because Fouhse seems to have done an abrupt turn, here. He’s gone from saying that if the work is done digitally, it’s too easy. Now he’s saying that doing it the hard way is useful to him because it slows him down and is more expensive, and imposing those constraints on himself is actually helpful and not a hindrance. In other words, he’s saying that using the 4×5 looks harder but is actually easier. In other words, he’s saying that imposing constraints on himself actually makes it simpler for him to get at making the art he wants to make.

One reason I find that interesting is that I’ve long suspected it was true for me, as well. SoFoBoMo is, if nothing else, an experiment in how imposing some seemingly pointless constraints (e.g. you must do everything in a one month period) would seem to make it harder to get a book done but actually makes it easier.

Andrew Ilachinski has an interesting post on his blog, Tao of Digital Photography, about this podcast from Brooks Jensen’s Lenswork podcast series.

Andrew summarizes:

Brooks Jensen, editor of Lenswork, recently posted a humorous podcast entitled “That’s Not What We Do” in which he recounts an incident while shooting in a park with a friend. He and photographer Joe Lipka were photographing at Fort Warden, WA. At some point, Joe went to the tourist center and got noticed by the woman at the service counter, who inquired about what he and Brooks were doing. Upon explaining that they were both photographers, the woman suggested they talk to the park manager, who was interested in buying some tourist shots to sell. Joe politely explained that neither he nor his other photographer friend take those kinds of pictures. Seeing that the woman was puzzled by his answer - after all, he is standing there with a bunch of camera equipment; what would all that gear be used for if not “taking pictures”? - Joe offered a the following line (that I suspect is familiar to most fine-art photographers placed in a similar situation): “We make pictures that don’t look like pictures of what we’re taking pictures of.” I only wish I were there to see the look of confusion on the poor woman’s face!

I guess it’s funny. I’ll admit I’m not so sure the joke isn’t on the photographers, though.

Here’s the deal from my point of view. I see three points that Lipka made:

1. We’re artists. We do stuff that doesn’t look like what you expect. That’s what makes it art.
2. You and the park manager aren’t artists. We know what you want, and you don’t want art, and you wouldn’t understand what we do because we’re artists and you’re not supposed to understand it.
3. We think the fact that our behavior confused you demonstrates that you’re an inferior person. (if you listen to the podcast, note that Jensen called the worker at the customer service desk a ‘gal’ and listen for his patronizing chuckle.)

Wow. Even more amazing to me, Jensen seems to think the entire episode is funny, which given Jensen’s views on making art at Real People Prices strikes me as hard to understand.

Is art photography really limited to photographs that don’t look the things they’re photographs of? Is it really true that that’s not what we do? I don’t think so.

Why did Jensen’s friend think that the park manager wouldn’t be interested in their art? If I were a park manager, and people were making art in my park, I would want to see the art. I might want to display the art in the visitor center. I might want to have a permanent collection of the art, at the park. If I were a park manager and liked the park I managed, I might want to buy art made in the park or about the park in my own art collection.

But no. Jensen’s friend decided (and Jensen apparently agreed), without any evidence at all, that the art they made wasn’t what the park manager wanted. It’s as if they’re defining art as “stuff nobody would want”. And they view this attitude, constructed entirely in their minds and quite probably wrong, as a good reason to laugh at the confusion they generated in this park employee who was, perhaps, trying to clue them in to the fact that the park manager might want to look at their art.

No wonder people think artists are a bunch of arrogant jerks who look at the rest of humanity with sneering condescension. People think that about artists because, in fact, some artists are arrogant jerks who look at the rest of humanity with sneering condescension.

No wonder there’s no market for art, and the general populace doesn’t care about art. Artists have defined what they do as ’stuff no one would care about’.

Jensen and his friend had the chance to take the artistic risk of being understood. They chickened out. All they did instead was confirm everyone’s worst stereotype of the arrogant artist. Everyone came out a loser.

It just makes me want to say bad words.

Some time ago, I had the extraordinary good fortune to be at a little talk given by the playwright Amy Freed, who at the time had just had her wonderful play The Beard of Avon produced at the Seattle Rep. After the talk, someone asked Amy about the support she’d gotten for her playwriting, and she said

The support I’ve been given has enabled me to take the biggest risk an artist can take - the risk of being understood.
-Amy Freed

I’ve thought about Amy’s statement a lot since I heard her speak way back in 2001. I think she’s put her finger directly on a big issue for the art world.

There’s a lot of art out there which, to borrow Amy’s phrase, doesn’t exactly run the risk of being understood. The artist stepped up to that risk, and then blinked and backed down. There are a lot of artists making art that’s not only not understandable, but isn’t meant to be understood.

I’m not talking about ambiguity. John Patrick Shanley wrote a beautiful, wonderful play titled Doubt, about an ambiguous situation where it appears as if a child has been molested by a priest. The play is deliberately written so that there is no authoritative answer to the question “Is the priest guilty?” Instead, that issue is left ambiguous, and we (as the audience) are forced to consider what we do when we aren’t sure but the stakes are very high if we make a mistake. Shanley’s play is not just ambiguous. It’s about ambiguity and how we respond to it. The play is both ambiguous and eminently understandable.

My fear of that risk is one of the reasons why I tried so hard to force myself to make my SoFoBoMo process be as open as I could stand. Posting my contact sheets felt pretty darn risky. There’s a strong urge to hide your mistakes, and I wanted to experiment and see what would happen if I forced myself to just put there out there in the open and let people look right at it all. I know that other people shared the sense that publishing the contact sheets for every single exposure I made was a risk, because the delay between my hitting ‘publish’ on that first contact sheet post and a friend calling me on the phone to say “What, have you lost your mind?” was about ten minutes. One of the things I wanted to do through SoFoBoMo was get past that fear of being understood.

Anyway, for me this fear was the big hurdle to getting the SoFoBoMo book done. There was a definite point in the process, when I was making the fundamental decisions about what the book would actually show, and it could go one of two ways. It could be a nice safe book of photos, with no text or just bland text. The other option was to go ahead and share more deeply about what my experience was actually like - order the photos and write text in a way that makes it clear what I actually thought and felt. The first book doesn’t run the risk of being understood. The second one embraces it.

I’m not saying that my book was a huge risk. It’s not sharing earth-shattering thoughts. And, truth be told, it probably doesn’t share as deeply or completely as it could, both because I backed off a bit and because it’s not always easy to make yourself be understood. But I did manage to not back off at the moment of that critical decision, and I think that taking that small risk made a big difference in the outcome. I’m a lot happier with the book I finished than I would be if I hadn’t taken that chance.

Thanks to Bernie Sumption, we now have a live SoFoBoMo.org website.

The most important point here is that, on www.sofobomo.org, you can now view a really nice display of completed projects, and you can submit your completed project to appear on that page. Once you submit it, it goes into a queue to be moderated (to avoid abuse) and once it gets approved, bingo! it’s on the ‘the projects’ page.

If you’ve completed your book, take a look at the projects display page (to see how your text, etc. will be displayed). You’ll need a smallish jpg (no larger than 150×150 pixels) and you’ll want to consider what brief description you want to use (if any).

As you can see, the URL you use can point wherever you like. I pointed mine to the PDF for my book; it looks like Bernie pointed his to his blog entry about finishing.

There you go, folks. Go submit your books! Earn the wild applause you deserve!

I wrote quite a while back about the impact of photographing with web display as the primary venue.

I found this post on Tim Connor’s blog to be an interesting read on that topic, and it goes on to talk about the social dynamics of getting ahead in the Flickr sort of world: