Musings on Photography

Colin Jago has an excellent post outlining his SoFoBoMo plans, including a photo of the camera gear he plans to use. (Warning to Leica Purists - prepare yourself before viewing the weird miscegenation Colin has assembled). He also outlines his basic book design decisions. All in all, excellent reading to get yourself charged up to go - read it all here.

I so enjoyed reading Colin’s post that I’ll follow his example. Other folks who feel moved to make similar posts on their own blogs might want to either leave a comment on my blog with a link, or perhaps leave a comment on Colin’s blog with a link (or both) so that it becomes a little easier to find each other’s planning posts.

So here’s my plan. This is the camera gear I’m planning on using:

That’s my trusty Canon EOS-5D, with the 24-105 f/4 L IS mounted. I’d prefer something a bit smaller but in the end this is what I use day to day, and since it’s the most flexible setup I have at hand it’s what I’ll use. In the lower left is a Garmin Etrex Legend HCX, which will ride in my pocket on the outings so that I can geotag the exposures - that isn’t really part of the project but I want to be able to sort out locations of the photos after the fact, and it’s very little additional effort. I considered using the little Canon PowerShot G9 but it’s just a smidgen slow for taking photos of the dog, who often races about at speed, so the 5d edged out the G9 on that basis. If not for the dog issue, the G9 might have won.

You’ll note that there’s no tripod pictured. My plan is to do the entire project without a tripod. I’ve been using the tripod less and less, but this part of my plan still feels a bit weird.

Not pictured is Kodak, the golden retriever who will accompany me on the project outings and may serve as the subject some of the time. The general plan is to take daily walks with the dog, and simply photograph while taking the walks. Think of it as combining dog walk therapy and photo therapy, and making a book of the result.

The book layout will be done in Adobe InDesign. Over the past few months I’ve gotten sufficiently familiar with it that it isn’t head-bangingly frustrating, and I have put together a test book and generated a PDF, so I’m confident that will all work out with only the usual botheration. One thing I’m pleased with is that I’ve figured out how to generate PDFs that show a two page spread (left and right hand facing pages) as one unit in PDF viewers, so that I can have text on the left page and the photo on the right page, and paging through the PDF is very akin to paging through a physical book (Colin mentions this problem in his post).

My plan is to start on April 1st. I have to hang a show on the 30th of March, so that show will be safely out of the way and not a distraction; the show comes down on May 3rd, which would be after the last day of my SoFoBoMo month. That works out nicely. If the weather is truly hostile at the start I may decide to delay a few days. I’d really like to get started, though. Has anyone else observed that it would actually be possible for a single photographer to do SoFoBoMo twice this year and not have the projects overlap? I mean, you’d have to be crazy, but…

Gordon McGregor has an interesting post on book design. Gordon, who’s braver than I am, generously shares his previous PDF format book-like efforts, three of them. He’s also got a book recommendation - I have requests for the book he recommends (and the sister volume on type) at the library, so I should have them in hand shortly. Go give Gordon’s blog a visit to see the book titles and his views on them.

In the meantime, I’ve struggled quite a bit with trying to put together a sort of first blush mockup of a book in Adobe InDesign. My struggles have NOT been with InDesign, which takes a bit of learning but is not horrible. Instead, I’ve spent a lot of time struggling with basic concepts of book design - questions like “What is the proper order of all that stuff at the front of the book?” and “What info is really supposed to go on the copyright page?” and so on.

It didn’t take me long to sit down and order up a pile of books from the library. So far I have examined four:

• Bookworks - Making Books by Hand - Gwenyth Swain.
• New Book Design - Roger Fawcett-Tang
• The Little Book of Layouts - David E. Carter
• Book Design and Production - Pete Masterson

The first book, Bookwords - Making Books By Hand, I requested because I have vague ideas of making extra-special one-off books by printing the pages on my z3100 and then building the pages into a book by hand. Great idea, but this is not the book to get me up to speed for that project. New Book Design I requested hoping it would give me fundamental concepts in book design. Instead, it’s a collection of photos of cover and page spreads for a bunch of modern books. That’s probably great if you’re already up to speed on book design, but it’s not what I wanted. The Little Book of Layouts is not really books at all - it’s all about brochures. Since what I want is help on book specifics, that’s not much help to me. All three of those will go back to the library.

The last book, Book Design and Production, is subtitled A Guide for Authors and Publishers. It’s exactly the sort of book I was looking for. I’ve been learning about ‘front matter’, ‘body’, and ‘back matter’. As I suspected, it turns out there’s a conventional order for everything, and the book has solid information on all of this. In addition, the book is largely oriented toward people who, like me, want to engage in the masochistic process of doing their own book layout using their own computer and some bit of software. There’s what seems to be a very realistic rundown on the various alternatives for software, including Microsoft Word,Pagemaker, Framemaker, Quark Xpress, InDesign, Ventura, Publisher. There’s even a highly enlightening comparison of the same text set with Word, Pagemaker, and InDesign. The difference in appearance between the text set in Word and the text set in InDesign is stunning and really has to be seen to be believed. Let’s just pause here and say that I’m not disappointed that I’ve purchased InDesign.

I liked this book so much that I immediately went to Amazon and purchased a copy. I’m going to want this far longer than the time the library will let me keep it.