On Content

Chris Klug comments on this post:

There are many styles of photo blogs. Some post images and say nothing. Others talk a lot and occasionally post an image. Your style seems (intentionally or not) to get us thinking more about the issues you raise and less about the image itself. It often is more about Musings on Life than photography, which is wonderful. Sometimes it feels as if the image is an afterthought. However, as Martin mentions the image above, so shall I: this is a truly lovely image

Thanks, Chris, for your kind words on both the photos and the content.

A few points about this blog that I try to make clear once a year or so:

I’m writing this blog mostly as a way for me to figure things out. Sometimes what I write is the end point of a long period of thinking about some topic, and sometimes it’s an immediate response to something I saw or heard or read. Most of the time, though, it’s more a recording of where my mind happens to be as I try to muddle things through. I don’t claim to know what’s right or wrong, but I do claim to know what I’m thinking. I’ve written things in this blog I now think are wrong. There’s no warranty that comes with the text. When I write about a technique or a process or some bit of gear in glowing terms, it’s because I’m using it and it works for me. It might not work for you – that’s ok, people are different. There are blogs that deal in photographic facts; this is not one of them. I’m more interested in the why of photography than I am in comparing camera and lens specifications.

The photos are, except when specifically called out in the text of a post, completely and utterly unrelated to the writing in the text. When I started writing this blog, the process of choosing appropriate photos for each post was just too much work. And so I punted, and took the easy way out, and so the process of selecting the photos for the posts works like this:

• I spend time making photographs. The photos that I think are winners generally (but not always) have copies sized for the blog that get put in one big directory I think of as “the pool”. (there are not many photos I think are winners). Often I have photos which are not winners, but are interesting for some other reason – they annoy me, or they’re nothing like what I expected when I let the shutter go, or they were interesting accidents, or there’s something else that catches my attention. Those interesting non-winners often get put in the pool directory as well. The pool is just a collection of photos that I think are interesting, and it turns out that often the photos which are most interesting from a process point of view are not the ones that are the best standalone photos. Not all the photos I make are candidates for the pool – I routinely make photos that I’m unwilling to put in a blog post, for reasons ranging from privacy to they’re boring accidental photos of the inside of my camera bag.

• I sit down to write a post. The first thing I do is I pick a photo out of the directory, drop it into the post. Most of the time I then delete it from the pool directory, but sometimes I forget (and thus a photo can get used more than once). I don’t try to match the photo to the post in any way; often I’m not clear exactly what I’m going to write, and even if I do have a clear idea it’s generally the case that the post ends up not being about that initial idea. So there ends up being no obvious connection between the text content of the post, and the photo that accompanies it. It’s almost completely random.

So the stream of photos is not directly connected to the stream of text. I suppose it’s possible that my subconscious mind is grinding away connecting the stuff, but that’s as directed as it gets. The text is a stream of things I’m thinking about. The photos are a stream of photographs I’ve made, both the successful ones and the un, and the photos are deliberately in no particular order at all. Sometimes a photo sits in the pool for a long time, sometimes it gets used the same day.

Anyway, this means that the content of this blog is a little different from most blogs. It means that the posts are usually not definite conclusions but are more often middle of the process fumbling attempts to sort things out, and it means that the photos are not a parade of my greatest hits but often more like a parade of my photos that didn’t quite work, but might not quite work in an interesting (to me) way. The photos and the text are two entirely unrelated streams. I don’t often comment on my own photos – maybe I should. Mostly, though, I find it interesting to just throw them out there and see what response they get, if any. I’ve put photos out there I thought were solid winners, only to get email saying they weren’t up to scratch. I’ve put photos I thought were peculiarly boring out there, and had people enthuse about how great they are. It’s been a lesson in perception, let me tell you.

This is a quirky way to do a blog, and I recognize that. It’s probably a horrid way to attract readers, and I recognize that, too.

The Cult of Done

SoFoBoMo is a way for us to make progress on the dream of doing a book. It’s a way to get something done. One of the tricks behind it is that by getting a book done, we free ourselves from the things that kept us from getting a bigger, better book – the one we really dreamed of – just plain done.

So, in some sense, this is particularly relevant: The Cult of Done Manifesto.

In particular the following items from the Manifesto seem appropriate:

Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.

Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.

The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.

Once you’re done you can throw it away.

Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.

People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.

Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.

Done is the engine of more.

PDF Books

Gordon McGregor has been thinking up a storm about PDF’s and books, and the advantages of PDF’s over physical books.

Go to his blog and read this post and then scroll back through the posts for a bit. Pretty interesting stuff, huh?

I have some thoughts, too – rather less well organized than Gordon’s are. I will, with a small apology, just sort of leap in.

I like our Kindle 2. I’ve read full length novels on it, and although I’d like the display contrast to be a bit higher, and I think there are improvements possible, I’m pretty impressed with the actual user experience of reading a book on the thing.

Part of what impresses me is the Kindle’s “bookness”. The Kindle does not pretend to be an all purpose computing device (well, maybe just an eensy bit). But because it behaves in a very book-ish way, my interactions with it play heavily on my expectations of how a book behaves. With the Kindle, I can turn pages, back and forth. I can write on the pages. I can place bookmarks. These are all things I do with books (yes, I’ve been known to write in my books. Sue me.)

So my Kindle gets to play on a whole host of behaviors that I’ve acquired in some 45 years of reading books. I’m sure there are things I do that I don’t even realize I do – books are just a part of my world, and I really can’t remember a time when they weren’t. I know books in the same way Thoreau was determined to know beans. I (and most other people) know books so well it’s hard for me to even articulate the understanding. I can, for instance, often remember about how far through a book a certain passage occurs, and I can often remember whether it falls on the left hand page or the right, at the top of the page, in the middle, or the bottom. That’s an adaptive behavior that I rely on heavily when I search a book for that passage. (and it doesn’t work on the Kindle, damn it).

I know there are things which are technically possible which the Kindle doesn’t do well. That’s ok. It’s not necessary to re-invent the book from whole cloth. We have a nice model of how books should behave, and although it’s highly dependent on a particular technology (paper, bound on one edge, printed on both sides, etc.) both the modern book and the modern literate human have sort of co-evolved over time to a point where things are pretty optimized.

One of the things I notice is that when a new technology comes around (for example, computer typesetting) the newcomers to the business (in this example, the smart folks writing typesetting software) are prone to assume that the way things are currently done is just a byproduct of the technology used. And they’re smart folks, they reason, so why not take the chance to “improve” things a bit. So they don’t bother learning about the 500+ years of accumulated wisdom about setting type. They just wing it. How hard can it be to plop the characters on the page, after all? You just stuff the words onto the line until it’s full, and then you start a new line.

And so we got typesetting software that did a dreadful job. Rivers. Widows, Orphans. All sorts of horrid stuff. And slowly, the world of computer typesetting came to realize that maybe, just maybe, those old guys who set that lead type might have figured a thing or two out in the 500 odd years moveable type had been in use. Amazing, I know. If those old guys were so smart, how come they didn’t have computers?

Same thing with houses. Architects are always coming up with the house of the future, and it has little to do with a right rectangular structure with a peaked roof on it. And somehow, despite all this innovation in the architectural world, people go right on building rectangular houses with peaked roofs, and the secret is this: a rectangular house with a peaked roof is a *really good solution* to the “how shall we build a house” question.

Same thing, I suspect, with the design of book-like things. We’ve had books for a long time. We’ve tried scrolls, and we’ve tried various sorts of bindings, and we’ve tried a lot of different things. And we’ve come to a point where books (at least in the left to right world) are usually bound on the left edge, and the pages turn from right to left, and the text starts at the top and runs down each page. Such a book is the rectangular house of the book world. It is ubiquitous for the simple reason that it almost always works as nearly as well as the perfect solution, and in most cases it’s superior to any other solution. Not always, but often enough that before we go to make a book that does something different, we should probably think really hard about why we’re doing that.

PDF’s (and Kindles) are like books in a lot of important ways. They have a heritage of bookness. We can turn to physical books with paper pages for a lot of clues about what is going to work well, and what isn’t.

So I read Gordon’s enthusiasm for the potential of PDF book-like things, and I am excited. And at the same time, I cringe when I realize that the photographic world is soon going to be inundated with things which are like the letters and flyers and documents we got when everyone first got their hands on a computer with word-processing software. We had 180 fonts in 17 different sizes, and by God, we were going to use all of them on every single page or die trying. And the result was, um, sub-optimal.

So I wonder how you tread the safe path between stodgy avoiding of innovation, and using all the fonts and all the sizes.

PDF and paper books

I see a lot of folks planning their participation for SoFoBoMo, and they’re all cranked up about Print On Demand (aka POD) books and POD publishers like Blurb, Lulu, and the rest.

And what confuses me, somewhat, is that the explicit goal of SoFoBoMo is not a paper book, but a PDF format file. Last year, we picked PDF as a way to do an end run around having participants struggle with the varied software, process, etc. of the multiple POD publishers, along with the turn around time for getting books printed and delivered. And it turned out that using the PDF format was a big bonus because it let participants share their SoFoBoMo books – something that would be hard to do if all we ended up with was physical paper books. As Gordon McGregor pointed out, last year we had 60 books finished. I looked at every single one. And if I’d had to buy 60 paper books, even if they were sold at the cost of production, I’d never have done that.

And thus it turns out that SoFoBoMo stumbled into the right solution, albeit for somewhat wrong reasons. We should have been unconcerned with the software worries (because generating a PDF requires some software, eh?) and we could have avoided turnaround issues by just saying that the time you lost to turnaround didn’t count. But instead we went the PDF route, and we reaped rewards unexpected in our common hours. Life is ever thus.

And so I urge the people who are busily learning Booksmart or other POD layout software to consider the benefits of PDF – sharable, it can be uploaded to the SoFoBoMo website (this feature is planned, anyway), free copying – all good things. It’s even true that it’s relatively painless to go from a PDF to a book with Blurb or other POD pubisher – export the pages as individual images, drop the pages into the POD software as full bleed pages, and order the book. In an important way, this keeps you from being tightly bound to a particular POD publisher. That’s exactly what I did to get a physical printed book – by aiming at the PDF as the primary output, I pretty much killed two birds with one stone.

Maybe it’s child’s play to generate a PDF from the various POD software tools each POD vendor provides. But if I were going that route, I’d want to verify that before I make that my plan, because it would be a bummer to miss out on all the advantages that PDF output provides.

And yes, I understand the significant emotional impact of holding in your hands an actual physical book, with real paper pages that have your photographs on them. But there are equally compelling experiences with that PDF file, too – and because the experiences occur in the mind of someone half a world away from you, there’s a tendency to discount them.

SoFoBoMo Preparations

One of the things which was a big help for me in my SoFoBoMo effort last year was that, with weeks still to to, I got busy making sure that I knew which PDF generation software I was going to use (Adobe InDesign, in my case), took the time to build a mockup of a book using images I had on hand, figuring out things like title pages, copyright pages, and a general page layout for the project I had in mind.

It turned out that I didn’t use ANY of those things quite in the way I envisioned. I changed around the layout, I changed the font and the arrangement of the title page, and so on. But by having done all that work up front, I was familiar enough with InDesign that the inevitable changes went smoothly and I spent almost no time during my month struggling with software issues.

Another thing I did was really streamline my photo processing workflow. I built custom actions in photoshop to perform the important steps, like sizing and sharpening the images to go into the book. Again, it turned out that I was still making tweaks to those actions, but the up front investment of time and energy into putting together a smooth, trouble free workflow from exposure through to plopping the images into InDesign paid handsome rewards when my month long effort started for real.

There’s only so much you can do to offload effort OUT of the 31 day period, because if you’re at all like me you’ll find your plans changing as the project progresses. But having a solid plan in place BEFORE the period starts not only ensures that you’re in a good starting position, it ensures that you’re up to speed on all the tools you’re going to use. And getting the learning curve part of your workflow out of the 31 day period sure leaves a lot more time and energy for the creative stuff. I still had plenty of anxiety during my month of activity, but it wasn’t the high stress “How can I get this #$%^&*(*^%$ software to do what I want” variety of stress.

SoFoBoMo Hardcore

I got some email from Sean McCormick, pointing me to this post:

My intention is to spend 48 hours traveling the Neutral Hills – an area of East Central Alberta, Canada – where I will assemble both a written and photographic diary of my trip while covering as much of the area as possible. This diary will be published in book form within a month of the completion of the project as per SoFoBoMo’s rules.

This will be an endurance test for me. I’ve put myself under pressure to produce images before, but I’ve never forced myself to do it over a 48 hour period with no sleep, regardless of weather and lighting conditions. This will be a new experience, which is the point of the exercise; to push myself past old limits and find new ones.

Wow. That’s all I can say about that – Wow. He’s imposing on himself a whole bunch of rules that go way, way beyond the simple SoFoBoMo restrictions. His whole concept is an intriguing study in using restrictions as a way to push yourself further into new artistic areas than you’ve gone before. Go read the whole thing. You’re not going to believe some of the rules he’s setting up.

I’m sure looking forward to seeing how his plans play out.

SoFoBoMo Follow Through

One of the problems I had last year came after I finished by book for SoFoBoMo, not before. The problem was that I finished the book, and rather than use that effort as a sort of launching pad for further efforts, I just sort of drifted to an aimless stop. Post SoFoBoMo Letdown, as it were.

So one of my goals for this year is to try to aim further out than the end of the 31 day period – to have a process that spins off the book a the right time to finish SoFoBoMo, but to then continue to work toward that more distant goal without really letting up. It’s sort of like playing pool. When you first start learning the game, it seems it’s all about getting the balls in the pocket. And then you get a bit more sophisticated, and you realize it’s about getting those balls in the pockets, and leaving the cue ball lined up for the next shot afterward.

I suspect this is one of the things that is easier said than done. But I know I’m not alone in my post-SoFoBoMo letup experience, so it’s worth thinking about now, before things get hectic and it becomes easy to focus on the short term goal of just finishing SoFoBoMo.

Double SoFoBoMo

As I write this, there are 343 people registered for SoFoBoMo 2009. That’s more than double the 170 people who signed up last year. And there are still 42 days to go before the earliest possible start date of May 1.

Whoo!

Name Your Dream Assignment

I noticed that Doug Plummer, (of Dispatches fame) has submitted a project to the “Name Your Dream Assignment” contest.

I’m a big fan of both Doug’s blog and his photography. If you browse back through his blog, you’ll see a fair number of posts about his dance photography, along with a fair bit of writing about his experiences photographing dance.

I think Doug’s proposal is excellent. Through his blog, I’ve seen the sort of work he does, and I know Doug would produce a lot of great photography if his proposal was selected.

So, please – take a moment, go over and browse his blog posts about still and video of dance. Go and read his proposal over at Name Your Dream Assignment. Think about the photos on Doug’s blog, and about his writing and open sharing of his photographic process, and consider that you’re not picking just a project proposal, you’re picking a project proposal where you know the person is an incredibly skilled and committed photographer with a deep, abiding, and personal interest in the subject. This is a proposal that comes directly from Doug’s love of both photography and dance – it’s not just an attempt to produce a proposal that’s attractive to a large group of people and will get a lot of votes.

And if you think Doug’s proposal has merit, please go and give it a positive vote. I know that you have to register to vote – yes, it’s a hassle. But you can avoid much of the hassle by unchecking the ‘send me lots of stuff’ check box on the registration page, registration takes only 30 seconds or so, and I really think Doug deserves the support.

So I’m asking, as a sort of personal favor, that if you think his proposal deserves a positive vote, please just register and give it a vote. It’ll only take a short while. Honest.

SoFoBoMo Discussion Group

In response to overwhelming popular demand, Hugh Alison has created our new, official SoFoBoMo 2009 discussion group over on Flickr.

You can find it at http://www.flickr.com/groups/sofobomo/

You will need a Flickr account to use it, but such accounts are free. (I now have two accounts, because I have forgotten the info needed to get access to my old one, created a new one, promptly created a new one, then forgot the info for the new one, and then remembered the info for the OLD one. Sheesh. Talk about embarassing.)

Go, now, and participate in the discussions there, while you while away the hours waiting for the starting gun.

(Many thanks to Hugh for taking the initiative and setting this all up, and being patient while I dithered.)