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…

It’s been just about a month since I got the 24-105 and the 24mm TS-E.  Time for at least a partial update.

Over the past month, the lens that’s ended up living on the body is the 24-105 IS.  It’s sharper than the 28-70 f/2.8L, and although it’s big, it’s no worse than the 28-70 was.

The big win, though, is the image stabilization.  Buying the IS lens was partly an experiment to see how I felt about handholding in the low light situations I’ve been running into lately.

So far, this experiment has been a success.  Image stabilization is not a panacea, but it’s clearly a partial solution to the ‘well stopped down for depth of field/low light’ problem a significant part of the time.  I’m still dragging out the tripod with regularity, but often on walks when I take just the camera, the IS means the difference between not being able to make the photo, and being able to make it.