Go Ahead, Make My Month

Light blogging, I know. Most of my attention is going to exploring a non-profit corp for SoFoBoMo.

But this was pretty exciting for me… I just got this email, from Clare Selley:

Dear Paul

I just wanted to say thank you for running SoFoBoMo – it got me to put together a book about my city which has now been accepted for commercial publication (with several tweaks, relayouts, text added, etc!)

Without SoFoBoMo I never would have had the inspiration, drive and target to put the book together and now I’m getting paid for it! I’ll be mentioning the challenge – and the website – in the book’s acknowledgements, I hope you don’t mind me quoting the rules!

~Clare.

That’s just incredibly exciting. I mean, a SoFoBoMo book, accepted for commercial publication.

On behalf of everyone who’s ever participated, I’d like to congratulate Clare. Clare, you are awesome. You are awesomely awesome.

I hope all the folks who’ve participated in SoFoBoMo get a thrill out of this. Every single one of you helped make this happen. SoFoBoMo is about getting a book *done*, not about getting it picked up for commercial publication. But when someone who did a book for SoFoBoMo gets it published, I think we all deserve a big helping of feeling thrilled.

And here, by ‘big helping’, I mean “break out the big bowls, pile it up high, maximum sized helping”.

Chance

I noted, yesterday, the passing of Merce Cunningham, the famous choreographer. Despite his prominence, I can’t say I knew very much about him until I read the entry on Wikipedia and this obituary at the LA Times.

One thing that caught my eye was his use of ‘chance operations’ like flipping coins or casting dice to make decisions in his artistic process – a practice which he apparently learned from John Cage. Much of what is available on the web about Cage’s and Cunningham’s use of ‘Chance Operations’ is either utter bafflegab dressed up poorly as deeply mystic philosophy, or bafflegab without the window dressing, which is unfortunate because it makes it very hard to understand exactly what Cage and Cunningham actually thought they were doing by drawing on chance operations to generate artistic decisions. Did they believe they were drawing on some mystic oracle for guidance? Or did they think that, by incorporating chance into their artistic process, they’d be forced to evaluate possibilities they would not have considered otherwise? Or both? I’ve found snippets of quoted writings that seem to point in both directions.

One of the things I miss most about the traditional darkroom process – developing film and conventional printing – is that because the process was filled with potential for mistakes, it was also filled with the potential for making serendipitous discoveries. I can’t say that I deliberately made bad prints just to jar myself out of a rut, but I can recall many times where I made a mistake (the most usual one was forgetting to stop down the lens after focusing) that resulted in a print that was bad but which also made me think “Oho! This is a bad print, but it’s a GOOD bad print, because it has shown me something I hadn’t considered.” In some sense, those (all too common) mistakes brought chance operations into my creative process, and that turned out to be a good thing.

I was a big fan of making conventional ‘test strip’ prints that covered the image entirely – using a whole sheet for a test strip – because in doing that, you see quite a lot of information you wouldn’t see if you just made a perfect exposure right from the start. A test strip is really just a carefully sequenced set of mistakes, from which the darkroom worker proposes to learn enough to make a good print.

And then I switched to digital printing, and then to digital capture, and this source of randomness in my process disappeared. I was aware of it at the time, and I even wrote about it some. Somehow, though, it’s never occurred to me to incorporate chance operations into my digital workflow.

Yet another thing for me to ponder in the midst of my current busyness. Time, I think, for me to get a few books about Cage and Cunningham from the library.

The Future of SoFoBoMo

Time for a little update on the future plans for SoFoBoMo.

The small news is that the date for the next SoFoBoMo is set: the fuzzy two month window will be from June 1, 2010 to July 31, 2010. As before, you get to pick any contiguous 31 days period inside that two month window.

The big news is that we’ve now set up a steering group to make the decisions. This was the first step in an effort to build a stable structure for running SoFoBoMo in the future.

Things in the works:

1. Careful consideration of creating a non-profit, 501(c)(3) qualified corporation to hold all the rights to SoFoBoMo, accept contributions, pay costs, and so on. Right now it looks very much like this is a go, and I’m just working out details of the arrangement. The goal here is not to create some monster organization, but to do what we need to do to shield the folks working on SoFoBoMo from legal problems, make it easy for folks to support SoFoBoMo financially, and to provide enough structure to make SoFoBoMo continue in a stable way into the future. If you have experience is starting such a corporation, I’d love to get your thoughts on that, please send me email.

2. The web site will be expanded and many new and wonderful features will be added. Things planned: many resources for people on topics like book design, PDF generation for both Mac and Windows, and probably some stuff containing the accumulated wisdom about how to be successful at getting a SoFoBoMo book done. When we have some of the structural decisions on this done, I expect we’ll be asking people to contribute to that.

3. We’ll be adding a discussion forum, tightly integrated with the main website, that gives people a place to get together, support one another, chat, discuss, moan and weep, etc. Our hope is that this forum will help ease the feeling that this year’s SoFoBoMo was not as convivial as last year’s.

4. We’re making a push to have SoFoBoMo escape from the fetters of its anglophone origins, see this post.

SoFoBoMo Request for Help

If you go look at the map on the front page of the SoFoBoMo website, and look at where all the participants are, you’ll notice an interesting thing: we had a lot of participation in places where English is spoken, and not much in other places. Naturally, we want to share the goodness of SoFoBoMo with everyone, regardless of what language they speak. So we’re embarking on a program do exactly that.

The brave man heading up this effort is Colin Jago, of auspiciousdragon.net fame.

Colin needs help. Over on his blog, he writes:

One of the great things about photobooks is that they are not constrained by either the language of the photographer or that of the viewer. Most, even accepting that not all, photobooks are about the pictures.

This year there were SoFoBoMo participants from around the world but the vast majority of them were English speakers. As a part of the plans for SoFoBoMo 2010 we would like to find ways of encouraging people who do not speak English to participate. We’ll need to find places to publicise the event and help with translating parts of the site.

In the immediate future we would like to get the following short text translated into as many languages as possible:

Solo Photo Book Month – The worst photo competition in the world.

A lot of photographers have considered making a book, but various concerns have stopped them. Heck, the same concerns stopped us. We worried that our photos weren’t good enough. We worried that we didn’t have enough photos. We worried that we couldn’t write the text, or couldn’t present a nice layout, or that we didn’t have the time to do a good job.

SoFoBoMo gives us (and you) a way around those fears. There’s no requirement that the photos be good (but we suspect you’ll be surprised by how good yours are). There’s no requirement to have any text at all (but that doesn’t mean you can’t write pages of flowing prose). And there is no requirement on quality of layout. There are just three constraints: all the work must be done in one continuous 31 day period that falls completely inside the two month window, the book must contain at least 35 photos, and you have to generate a PDF of the book. That’s it.

SoFoBoMo started in English. People joined in from all over the world. We’d like to see more people join in from more countries and in more languages because photos speak for themselves. If you would like more information please visit www.sofobomo.org If you could translate any of the information pages then we’d be delighted if you would help. Please contact lingo-at-sofobomo.org

It is free to participate. There are very few rules and absolutely no prizes. It is a lot of fun. You’ve nothing to lose.

If you can help translate this into any language I’d be grateful if you would contact me. Either leave a comment here (which I won’t publish – I’ll email you) or use the email address in the text above.

If you can help, please, follow this link and go leave a comment on Colin’s blog post, or use the email embedded in the quoted text.

17mm TS-E

So, Canon introduced the 17mm TS-E tilt-shift lens. I played with my friend’s 14mm f/2.8L. I fiddled just a bit with his 17-40mm zoom.

The desire for the 14mm is low. The desire for the 17-40 is limited by the distortion. The desire for that 17mm TS-E is, consequently, high.

The price is a bit of an ouch.

It does not help that Canon has released a NEW 24mm TS-E, replacing the model I have. The new one is, of course, nicer than the one I have. The price for that is a bit of an ouch, too.

And all this, combined with the limited availability of the 45mm TS-E and the 90mm TS-E, makes me wonder if those lenses are slated for replacement, too.

This gear lust is a frustrating business.

Moving Forward

Now that my SoFoBoMo books have been done for a while, I’ve had a chance to step back and do a bit of thinking about how my own SoFoBoMo experience went this year. I expected a repeat of last year’s experience, but fortunately that’s not what I got.

I went into the fuzzy month window clueless about what I wanted to photograph, but mostly unconcerned. Last year I had detailed plans, all of which went out the window when I picked up the camera and began. That’s the way it is for me – if I have plans, I end up throwing them out more or less straight away. So this time, I planned to have no plan, if you get my drift.

And sure enough, I ended up thoroughly wrapped up in the project I started on without even being sure I wanted it to be my SoFoBoMo thing this year. So wrapped up in it, in fact, that it was clear to me more or less from the outset that the project would continue on well past the end of SoFoBoMo. That change of plans put SoFoBoMo in a different light. I was suddenly confronted with the question “How do I crank out a book from a project which is just barely under way?”, which is a very different proposition from “How do I do a project which I can finish and turn into a book in 31 days?”

In the end, I decided to try to use SoFoBoMo as a springboard – a way to get some momentum to carry the project forward. My plan to was to make a lot of photos – as many as I could in the time allowed, and then to do a rough edit, picking out some interesting ideas, and then very quickly and without a lot of existential anxiety, sort of slam them into a book, upload the result, and then quickly move on. I wanted to use the goal of getting a book done to be a goad to get started on the photography, to use the book as a way to pick out some of the interesting ideas I’d come across, and perhaps write some text that did the same thing – just sketch around the ideas for the more long term project.

In the end, the first two photo sessions netted me enough photos that I could, with some ease, go over the 35 photo minimum. I continued on, though, making a lot more photos. In the end, I had so many photos that I just cut the book in half, called the first part “Part I”, the second part “Part II”, and did two books. I could have done one higher quality book, but remember that I wasn’t aiming for quality – I was aiming for momentum and insight. To make matters more confused, at that point I was only vaguely articulating this momentum not quality concept to myself. I’m convinced that this was the right move for me. To be sure, I’ve seen some really high quality books in the pool of completed books this year – but part of the charm of SoFoBoMo is that each of us comes to the process with different goals, and each of us thus gets to optimize the experience to suit who we are and our needs of the moment. That this makes it hard to compare SoFoBoMo books is, I think, a very positive thing – everyone understands that if you compare two books, you are comparing an apple with a duck.

In any case, this decision of mine has netted me some interesting feedback, all of it useful and all of it deeply appreciated. One sort of feedback has been observing that there are some lovely images in there, and the ‘quality’ of the images is high, which might mean a lot of different things.

Another sort of feedback, equally useful, has been that the books don’t seem to have a concrete narrative, don’t seem to be very cohesive, and are not very tightly edited, with some ideas unexplored and others sort of hammered to death. And all that’s true, too. The image sets are NOT particularly cohesive, because while I was whacking out the books, trying not to let the effort needed stall the project, I had not yet (and still have not yet) entirely sorted out what the entire project is about. It’s just begun, and I expect that over the next few months I will have a few of those moments where I’ll sit up sharply in my chair before the monitor, and think “Oh! OHHH! I think I have figured out something important!” And when that happens, the direction of the whole enterprise will shift in some subtle (and perhaps not so subtle) ways. Worse, I fully expect that this will happen repeatedly, to the point where I’ll look at those first photos and think “Oh, damn. What could I have been thinking when I made these?” Actually, that’s already happened.

That leaves me with a list of issues to explore as I take the project forward: narrative, repetition, breadth of coverage versus narrow more focused view.

Onward.

PDF

So, it turns out that there’s PDF, and then there’s PDF, and to do the blurb PDF->blurb book thing, you need to take your book and crank out not just any old PDF, but specifically a PDF/X-3. (side note: if someone told me that a PDF/X-3 was in fact an experimental aircraft, I would believe them).

Now, InDesign will happily crank out PDF/X-3 format. Or at least, when I go to the ‘export’ panel on my mac, that’s one of the options I can pick. Of course, if you’re going to use InDesign, you have to pay the Adobe tax, both the fiscal one and the sort that raises your blood pressure every time you’re forced to contact Adobe Support. Anyone know anything about third party PDF software for Mac and Windows? Could you get by with just Adobe Acrobat and your handy-dandy word processor?

Far and away, most of the email I got about SoFoBoMo this year had to do with PDF’s. PDF’s that were too large. Trouble cranking out PDF’s. PDF’s from Windows. PDF’s from Macs.

What the world needs is a good summary of the options for cranking out PDF files for all platforms, but especially Mac and Windows, and especially ESPECIALLY Windows.

Any volunteers to lead such an effort?

Thanks

Quite a few folks have written thanking me for the whole SoFoBoMo thing. I appreciate the thanks!

I’m happy so many folks have found SoFoBoMo to be worthwhile.

And that brings me ’round to the points behind this post.

First, let me bring to your attention two folks who have done yeoman’s service: Bernie Sumption, who did the website work, and Gordon McGregor, who with Bernie set up the blog aggregator and who has been SoFoBoMo’s foremost cheerleader. Thank you, both of you.

Second, while I appreciate the thanks, the thanks should really go to the nearly 900 people who participated this year. Each and every one of you contributed to the effort. Whether you registered early or toward the end, whether you finished a book or not, whether you blogged about your experience regularly or not at all, whether you were one of the ones helping people solve their problems or one of the ones being helped, your participation helped make SoFoBoMo 2009 a smashing success. Without the folks who participated, there would have been no SoFoBoMo. Thank you, each and every one of you.

And finally, I just spent some time browsing the page of completed books. It is, by any measure, extraordinary. Books done with sophisticated wunder-cameras. Books done with cell phone cameras. Subjects ranging from architecture and landscape through mother’s wisdom and on to quotidian scenes. Books done at every skill level, using bookmaking tools ranging from the simplest possible to professional level. Books that follow traditional book design principles, and books that test the limits of what photo books can be. Even my wildest dreams of what it might be like when I first floated the idea of SoFoBoMo pale when compared to the reality of this years 200+ books.

So – to all of you who participated – thank you, thank you, thank you. I am, like Miranda, astounded:

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!

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.