Quotidian

As I’d hoped, the M9 has started to get carried around when I head out. I don’t know quite what you’d call such a camera. Walkabout camera, maybe. Quotidian camera, that’s the phrase I tend to use in my head.

The reason I think of it that way is that when I copy the previous day’s images off the SDHC card in the morning, I’m seeing lots of what I think of as quotidian photographs – photographs of things I see in daily life. The above photo, made in a coffee shop in Ashland, Oregon, is an example. I was waiting in line, looked around, saw this countertop/shelf, lifted the camera, and made that photo.

I don’t know that such photos are going to turn into a larger body of work; I suppose at some point threads will emerge and I’ll follow them along, and I’ll get something cohesive. For right now, though, they seem to be a mishmash – a way to experimenting visually, playing with tools and compositions and objects in ways I haven’t done before.

Elizabethan

  

My friend Bill and I made some progress on our theatre photography project this past weekend when we got the chance to photograph in the Elizabethan theatre in Ashland, OR. It’s a fabulous space, and we learned a lot of new things photographing in an outdoor theatre for the first time. The only downside to this outing was that the theatre was still full of tarps to protect things from the weather. We’ll be going back, probably to photograph the theatre on a Monday evening (when the theatre would ordinarily be dark).

One of the delights of this project has been how helpful the folks at various theatres have been, giving us unrestricted access to the theatres, working to find time slots when we can photograph, and so on. Oregon Shakespeare Festival is no exception; we can’t possibly thank them enough.

I have to say that when we started this project, I didn’t think the weather sealing on my camera gear would be a consideration. Things don’t always work out quite the way you envision, and that can be a good thing.

SoFoBoMo 2010: the new website goes live

After all the hard work (and all of your patient waiting) the new, enhanced SoFoBoMo website is now online at www.sofobomo.org.

If you participated last year, you should use the username you used last year. The passwords for accounts from last year have all been reset, so you should use the ‘I forgot my password’ feature; you’ll get sent an email that will let you reset your password.

There will be the inevitable glitches with the website as it gets explored by all of you. Let us know what problems you find, and please be patient while we get it all ironed out.

67 days to the start of the fuzzy window. Get ready!

Ground

We’re sort of programmed to look horizontally. When I took forestry classes, I learned to look up, into the canopy of the forest, as well as horizontally.

The camera has been teaching me to look down, straight down, for some time now. You think of the ground as just ‘ground’ but it’s rather startling to see what’s actually down there when you look without thinking ‘ground’ as you do it.

Practice and exercises

Michael Johnston has an interesting post over on TOP about some exercises he recommends. I don’t have much to say about Mike’s suggested exercises – I think they’re probably pretty useful. It’s really the comments that I find interesting.

The interesting thing about the comments is that they reflect a trend I’ve noticed before – that the people who protest that the exercises are stupid and counterproductive and useless are the people who have never done and would never consider such exercises.

I mean, what’s the cost? The one exposure exercise is opportunity cost only, a fallacy if there ever was one. Potential photographs stream past us at infinite rate, and all we can do is dip into the stream now and then. How many photos have we missed if we don’t make any photos? An infinite number. How many photos have we missed if we take one? The same infinite number. How many have we missed if we take 10,000? The same infinite number.

And the ‘make a lot of photos’ exercise – what can the possible harm be? You go out with your DSLR for some time, and you make 300 exposures, and perhaps all of them are crap. Ok, delete them.

It’s staggering to me that so many photographers think photography is about sitting at a computer and reading stuff on the internet, or sitting with a book and reading about photography in their den. And it’s really about – dare I utter the phrase? – *making photographs*.

As Ted Orland puts it, the function of 99% of the art you make is to enable you to make the 1% that soars. You can’t go through life making only perfect art. You have to make a vast, staggering pile of stuff that falls between outright mistakes and stuff that’s pretty damn good but not quite there, along with the stuff that takes people’s breath away.

The thing about photography, especially digital photography, is that the feedback is so good and so fast. Make some photos. Look at them – are they good, or bad? Which ones are good? Make more like that. Which ones are bad? Make fewer like that. Repeat. The more photographs you make, the more feedback you get. If you don’t make photographs, you don’t get any feedback. It’s not rocket surgery.

Maybe the reason I feel this way is that I think *I* ought to make more photographs. A lot more photographs.

SoFoBoMo on Facebook and Twitter

  

If you want to keep up on the latest news about SoFoBoMo in general and SoFoBoMo 2010 in particular, there are now two more official venues:

• The official SoFoBoMo page on Facebook (just search for SoFoBoMo, you’ll find the discussion group and the official page). Become a fan!
• The official SoFoBoMo Twitter feed – @SoFoBoMo (or go to http://twitter.com/SoFoBoMo)

The big push for now is to get the word out. Becoming a fan on the Facebook page and becoming a follower on the Twitter feed helps us get visibility. Retweeting tweets from the Twitter feed helps, too.

We should have the new website up any day now – just a few more fixes and it will be online, replacing the old page at http://www.sofobomo.org. We’ll have a discussion forum, a resource wiki where participants can both contribute to the knowledge base and find answers, and both an official blog as well as individual blogs for participants.

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I think I am going to have to spend some time walking around in town. Maybe I’ll start parking at the library at the far end of town and walking the length of town twice to run all my errands. So many angles. It feels like it’s a different part of my brain that gets exercised when I photograph there instead of in the forest or out on the valley floor.

Well, crud

Yesterday, figuring enough time had passed since the release of each firmware update, I updated the firmware in both my Leica M9 and my Canon EOS 5DmkII.

Today, Canon retracted the firmware update I installed yesterday.

I note that they have not given me a way to restore the firmware that was working just fine for me, the jerks.

Truly, this is a development that puts the icing on an day in which I had already used up the day’s allotment of bad words and moved on to inventing new bad words, the use of which is unregulated. Bad words with lots of hard consonants, and fricatives.

And in fact, that’s what I think of Canon right now. What a bunch of plosive fricatives! It’s a good thing they are not here, if I could get my hands on the person responsible for this, I’d give them a glottal stop they wouldn’t soon forget, let me tell you.

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Leica M9 Firmware update 1.116

I just downloaded firmware update 1.116 for the Leica M9, and installed it in my M9. So far, so good.

The instructions say that it will take the camera 180 seconds to perform the update process. I imagine this is dependent on the SDHC card used. I used a SanDisk Extreme 30MB/s class 10 SDHC card. My camera performed the update in 1 minute, 48 seconds.

The big improvement I noticed in the notes that came with the update was the mention that formatting SD/SDHC cards was faster.

Before the update, my camera formatted the card mentioned above in 56.1 seconds. After the update, it formatted the same card in 5 seconds. Whoo!