Musings on Photography

My createspace process ran into a hitch getting through the review process on their end.

For some reason they flagged it as bleeding past the edge of the page. I’m suspecting that this is a result of how I had the bleed options set when I generated the PDF. So I wanted to go ahead and order a proof. But for some strange reason, I couldn’t.

I sent email to support, but of course it was the weekend, so that all got delayed. Yesterday when I went to check, suddenly I could order the book - so I did. We’ll see if it’s all messed up when it arrives.

I later got email from createspace saying the problems had been resolved. I’m unclear if this was my mistake or just a glitch on their end. Not a big deal regardless.

I’m looking forward to seeing all these books.

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.

Let us say that art is art only when it is in a mind, either at the creating or the beholding it creates (when it is successful), a new ordering of the mind. At this point, whenever it occurs, it is art - that is, it is functioning.

Elton Bennett (From Elton Bennett - His Life and Art, by Archie Satterfield)

I got a copy of this book from the library after MIke Mundy mentioned him in this comment. From reading the book, Bennett sounds like quite the individualist, steadfastly swimming against the ‘art establishment’. Such things are hard to judge from just the one viewpoint provided by a single book, of course, but I imagine that Bennett’s steadfast insistence that his prints sell for no more than $15 probably had something to do with the rejection and heat he took from the galleries. That and the fact that Bennett doesn’t seem to have been a person who had a very tolerant view of anything he saw as pretentious behavior.

What I found interesting is that Bennett seems to have slowly built up his distribution channel until he was dealing with retailers all over the country and having difficulty dealing with the workload his sales imposed. And he did all this back when the internet and the www were not yet even a gleam in anyone’s eye.

The book is pretty breezy and loose, as opposed to being a dusty tome of scholarly effort, but a sense of the sort of person Bennett was and the philosophy that brought him to his decision to produce art that sold at prices average people could afford come through very clearly. Nice reproductions of Bennett’s work, as well.

Two books from the library, ordered because I saw them mentioned somewhere. (I know at least one commenter asked where I find out about books. I don’t know, honestly. I order them from the library when I see them mentioned somewhere, and by the time the arrive I’ve forgotten where I found out about them. Sorry.)

First book: Travelling Light - A Photographer’s Journey by Deborah DeWit Marchant. This one is autobiographical, tracing in both words and photos the arc of Marchant’s life. It’s an introspective, open, honest, somewhat spiritual journey from her early adulthood to the present. I found it interesting, compelling, and an easy read. It’s about photography as a lifestyle, not photography as in f-stops, film, and cameras. If you’re using a camera as a handy tool to figure things out, and you feel that resonance when you read “The life unexamined is not worth living” then this book is a good bet. Otherwise, perhaps not. [Yes, I'm aware that my book reviews often consist of lengthy ways of saying 'this book will appeal to the sort of person to whom this sort of book is appealing'. ]

Second book - Writing Past Dark, by Bonnie Friedman. After reading the first essay in this book (”Envy, the Writer’s Disease”), I was in love with it. Not only did Friedman express a lot I agreed with, she had the incredible great vision to quote the very passage of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 that I quoted here, and express much the same sentiment as I did. How brilliant is that?

Sadly, things went downhill rapidly after that. I think Friedman, perhaps, wants to write like Annie Dillard. I love Annie Dillard’s books, I love her writing. It’s as if Dillard has, by herculean effort, managed to focus the entire output of the sun onto a pinprick spot in the world, and that intense focus makes everything dazzlingly bright. I read a paragraph or two of Dillard’s writing, and before I’ve gotten far, there’s a loud ‘bang’ and all the circuit breakers trip inside my skull, and I’m forced to sit quietly for a few minutes, with a little curl of smoke drifting out one ear. Dillard is incredible but I must read her writing in little snatches lest I become completely overwhelmed.

Anyway, that’s beside the point, which was that Friedman wants to be Dillard but isn’t. The struggle for laser-like focus is there, but not the insight. Instead it comes off as very focused whining. Lengthy angst filled stories about writing school. Lengthy agonizing about writing stories that hurt people you love.

Paul gives it two thumbs down. Somewhere in the world, there’s someone to whom this book will appeal. But I’m not that sort.

Yesterday the UPS man delivered my copy of Creative Authenticity, by Ian Roberts. It’s subtitled “16 principles to clarify and deepen your artistic vision.” As I am reading through the book, I’m rapidly becoming glad that I didn’t let the subtitle keep me from buying the book, and also coming to suspect that the subtitle is something of a disservice to the content.

It’s not some iteration of 16 fundamental principles. It’s more a collection of 16 essays, some of them closely related and some of them not, but all of them touching on the actual process of making art. Quoting from the introduction

A friend reading the book suggested that the principles should be more active: Search for Beauty instead of Searching for Beauty, for example. And that there should be an action step at the end of each section.

That as it happens is exactly what I don’t want this book to be. In raising questions and possibilities, a quick call to arms is probably going to be superficial and counterproductive.

I’m not sure this book is for people who want to create but don’t. It seems to me that in the end, you have to plunge in, fears and all. There’s something courageous about it. If a person is too timid to even start, I’m not sure what it would take to get that person started. I’m not a believer in the books and courses that advocate going into creativity rituals and altar making and mask making in order to get unstuck and get started. Maybe that stuff works. I don’t know. It just seems to me like more strategies to avoid getting on with it. This then is a book for people who are in the thick of it.

A quick call to arms this isn’t. So far I’ve read stuff that resonates strongly for me. The first essay touches on beauty, and it’s perhaps the best all around treatment of the subject of beauty and art that I’ve read. Enlightening without being pedantic. Useful for an artist in what I’l call a ‘Shut up and Play Yer’ Guitar’ sense - that sense that we’re discussing beauty in a context where if our discussion isn’t helping us when we sit down at the easel or put the camera on the tripod then perhaps we’re really discussing angels and the heads of pins. And, in the same essay, Roberts does a neat end run around the entire quagmire of creativity and originality by arguing that, as artists, we’d be better off not worrying about ‘creative’ or ‘original’ but instead aiming at producing art that is ‘authentic’ in the sense that it reflects us as individuals.

I’m only part way through, but I’m starting to suspect that this book will end up on the shelf next to Art and Fear and The View from the Studio Door.

[Side note: Unlike many of the books I've bought recently, this one is a beautiful book. Ok, not quite - the cover doesn't float my boat. But the book itself is nicely designed - simple, but beautiful in a functional way. The typesetting is good. The margins are not stingy. The text is not set too tightly and the line spacing is generous. My only complaint is that it's perfect bound, and as always, I find the binding frustrating because when held open at the bottom, the pages try to close at the top (and vice versa). What a delight to find a book on photography that's not a horror, as so many of the books I've bought recently have been.]

My copy of Digital Book Design and Publishing by Douglas Holleley arrived yesterday. This was one of the books that got so many recommendations that I ordered it sight unseen from the publisher. (Note:the reason it took so long to arrive is that Holleley was away traveling. I’m guessing folks who order today will get their copies more quickly.)

I haven’t made it all the way through the book yet. Some of the stuff covered is not really of interest to me - the section on scanning, for instance, is well done but of very limited use to me. But the parts that I’ve looked at are impressive in how they communicate what I want to know and manage to sneak in other stuff that I didn’t know I wanted to know.

I found the first chapter, titled “The Nature of the Book” to be particularly illuminating. It’s something of a rumination on what makes books book-like and other things not-book-like. To quote a passage:

In a book one looks at images and words sequentially. The author has the power to control the nature of the experience by altering the order of the pages so that the reader can be led through the work in a pre-determined path.

Photographers such as Minor White and Nathan Lyons have demonstrated through their art-practice and teaching, that the thoughtful sequencing of images is an almost indispensable tool of visual authorship. Keith Smith in The Structure of the Visual Book, has codified many of Lyon’s thoughts on this matter and the reader of this book is encouraged to refer to Smith’s volume. Both White and Lyons see the sequence as a strategy independent of the forum in which the images are viewed, seeing it as equally valid for exhibitions, portfolios, or books. However, of these choices, the book presents the greatest opportunity to realize the full power of this approach.

Naturally, I read this passage in a moment of great personal weakness and have already ordered Smith’s The Structure of the Visual Book, even going so far as to hit the ‘instant gratification’ button on Amazon.com, so that book should be in my hands late Monday.

In the meantime, I highly recommend Holleley’s book. It’s opening my eyes to a lot of book design issues, which is nice but also will complicate my SoFoBoMo efforts.

Oh, well. Ain’t nothing easy.

As with most books that appear in my ‘books to read’ pile, I’ve long since forgotten what caused me to get this book, but I’ve picked up Architecture of the Absurd (How “Genius” Disfigured a Practical Art) by John Silber.

I’m only about halfway through this slender (91 pages) volume, but so far it’s an entertaining and engaging read. It’s ostensibly discussing architecture but in fact spans across the art world in general. (As a side note, if writing about music is like dancing about architecture, as Frank Zappa suggested, then writing about architecture is like like… oh, the mind boggles. Nevermind.)

Rather than try to summarize Silber’s argument, I’ll just quote a passage, in which Silber in turn quotes Professor Donald Weismann of the Art Department at the University of Texas, Austin:

We got to a point in the social history of contemporary art where NOVELTY - far out, outrageous difference with whatever is current at the time - appears as the raison d’etre for an artist’s notoriety called “success.” If the painting, or whatever, is not SOMETHING NEW, something shocking, outlandish, tabooed, generally unprecedented, it doesn’t attract the attention of the public in large numbers and thereby not the dealers’ interest.

I’ve written about this pressure for novelty and the concomitant trend toward shock, offense, etc. before. And I’m sort of curious to understand exactly where this came from, and why, and why it persists, and what that means for the rather dismal relationship between the mass of humanity and Art.

It more and more seems to me that, by indulging in this trend, the world of Art is becoming increasingly detached from society in general - folks in general hold artmaking in pretty low esteem, perhaps quite rightly.

Anyway, it’s an interesting trend, and Silber’s book seems like a pretty interesting exploration of the whole business. Don’t let the architecture bit dissuade you from giving it a look.