Musings on Photography

I’m by nature the sort of person who, after doing something, tends to sit down and pick apart what happened, look for insights and lessons, and think a bit about what might be done differently. I do realize, though, that not everyone is like that. Fair enough.

I also realize that SoFoBoMo 2008 isn’t over. There are a lot of folks still in the middle of their projects. So on the one hand I’m not eager to start some sort of postmortem analysis with an eye to doing it again next year, because it’s sort of jumping the gun a bit. On the other hand, I’m eager to catch people’s feelings and impressions before they start to fade.

So, with all those implicit caveats in place, I’d be interested in hearing from people about their SoFoBoMo 2008 experience, with a view to setting up something to do it again in 2009.

The obvious questions are:

Was it fun?
What sort of things did you learn?
Was your experience pretty much what you expected, or it did turn out that doing the book was wildly different from what you’d pictured when you signed up?
What aspects of the whole thing were frustrating?
What aspects were most rewarding?
Having participated this year (regardless of whether you finished it or not), would you ever want to do it again?
Do you have suggestions about ways to change things to make it more successful/fun/educational/rewarding for participants in future SoFoBoMo events?
What resources did you find helpful?
What aspects of SoFoBoMo were positive surprises? What aspects were disappointments?
How about that fuzzy month thing? Did that work for you, or not?

I’m not so much putting up those questions expecting people to drill through and answer them (although if people do I’m very interested in reading your answers) as much as I think such a list of questions might be a good way to start a low intensity, ongoing discussion about whether there’s enough interest in SoFoBoMo to do it again and if so, what we might do differently next time.

Feel free to put your thoughts in the comments here, or if you’d like to share your thoughts but not in public, just email them to me.

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.

Some time ago, I had the extraordinary good fortune to be at a little talk given by the playwright Amy Freed, who at the time had just had her wonderful play The Beard of Avon produced at the Seattle Rep. After the talk, someone asked Amy about the support she’d gotten for her playwriting, and she said

The support I’ve been given has enabled me to take the biggest risk an artist can take - the risk of being understood.
-Amy Freed

I’ve thought about Amy’s statement a lot since I heard her speak way back in 2001. I think she’s put her finger directly on a big issue for the art world.

There’s a lot of art out there which, to borrow Amy’s phrase, doesn’t exactly run the risk of being understood. The artist stepped up to that risk, and then blinked and backed down. There are a lot of artists making art that’s not only not understandable, but isn’t meant to be understood.

I’m not talking about ambiguity. John Patrick Shanley wrote a beautiful, wonderful play titled Doubt, about an ambiguous situation where it appears as if a child has been molested by a priest. The play is deliberately written so that there is no authoritative answer to the question “Is the priest guilty?” Instead, that issue is left ambiguous, and we (as the audience) are forced to consider what we do when we aren’t sure but the stakes are very high if we make a mistake. Shanley’s play is not just ambiguous. It’s about ambiguity and how we respond to it. The play is both ambiguous and eminently understandable.

My fear of that risk is one of the reasons why I tried so hard to force myself to make my SoFoBoMo process be as open as I could stand. Posting my contact sheets felt pretty darn risky. There’s a strong urge to hide your mistakes, and I wanted to experiment and see what would happen if I forced myself to just put there out there in the open and let people look right at it all. I know that other people shared the sense that publishing the contact sheets for every single exposure I made was a risk, because the delay between my hitting ‘publish’ on that first contact sheet post and a friend calling me on the phone to say “What, have you lost your mind?” was about ten minutes. One of the things I wanted to do through SoFoBoMo was get past that fear of being understood.

Anyway, for me this fear was the big hurdle to getting the SoFoBoMo book done. There was a definite point in the process, when I was making the fundamental decisions about what the book would actually show, and it could go one of two ways. It could be a nice safe book of photos, with no text or just bland text. The other option was to go ahead and share more deeply about what my experience was actually like - order the photos and write text in a way that makes it clear what I actually thought and felt. The first book doesn’t run the risk of being understood. The second one embraces it.

I’m not saying that my book was a huge risk. It’s not sharing earth-shattering thoughts. And, truth be told, it probably doesn’t share as deeply or completely as it could, both because I backed off a bit and because it’s not always easy to make yourself be understood. But I did manage to not back off at the moment of that critical decision, and I think that taking that small risk made a big difference in the outcome. I’m a lot happier with the book I finished than I would be if I hadn’t taken that chance.

Thanks to Bernie Sumption, we now have a live SoFoBoMo.org website.

The most important point here is that, on www.sofobomo.org, you can now view a really nice display of completed projects, and you can submit your completed project to appear on that page. Once you submit it, it goes into a queue to be moderated (to avoid abuse) and once it gets approved, bingo! it’s on the ‘the projects’ page.

If you’ve completed your book, take a look at the projects display page (to see how your text, etc. will be displayed). You’ll need a smallish jpg (no larger than 150×150 pixels) and you’ll want to consider what brief description you want to use (if any).

As you can see, the URL you use can point wherever you like. I pointed mine to the PDF for my book; it looks like Bernie pointed his to his blog entry about finishing.

There you go, folks. Go submit your books! Earn the wild applause you deserve!

My book is done.

See: http://www.butzi.net/download/sofobomo 2008-150.pdf for the pdf version

Also, for those who like the Issuu presentation,

More on my thoughts when I get a chance.

I might make a few tweaks before the official deadline.

I am approaching the finish line, at long last. I put in a long day with InDesign today, although the sun was shining and the birds were singing. My eyes are tired, I am thoroughly sick of looking at the book layout, but it is almost (but not quite) there. This evening I made photos for the front cover and the back cover - I think the front cover one is in the bag but the back cover one - well, that one includes me, am I’m fairly confident what I did came out badly.

I went into the final book layout confident that I had the sequencing and the spreads worked out. About 20 minutes into today’s session that sequencing was out the window, I was busily resequencing, and an entirely new way of integrating the text and the photos had been started. Writing the text was a head banging experience. No, it was worse than that. It was so bad that every so often, I would imagine getting up from the computer and banging my head on the wall as a pleasant break.

Some lessons learned (and in some cases, relearned), in no particular order:

• Working at the computer for too long without taking breaks is more tiring that I expect it will be. Every time.
• After a day of working at the Mac Pro, my hands and wrists are carpal’ed out. My right hand and wrist are the worst, because the Apple MIghty Mouse is, in fact, just about the least ergonomic mouse I’ve ever used. To make up for this lack of ergonomics, the Mighty Mouse has a scroll rollerball dingus that I must clean using various dangerous liquids every week or so, or it stops working. In my not particularly humble opinion, this makes the Apple Mighty Mouse the worst mouse ever and an instrument of Satan. As soon as the replacement I will order tonite arrives, I will take my Apple Mighty Mouse, put it on the driveway, and run over it with the Subaru. And I will take pictures, and post them here. I have expressed incandescent hatred for things in the past, but my hatred for the Apple Mighty Mouse is not just incandescent. It is brighter than a thousand suns.
• I had surprisingly little trouble getting InDesign to do what I wanted. The work of doing a book layout before my month started was time well spent.
• I have made laserprinted draft copies, two sided. This is a nice way to get a feel of what the book would feel like in your lap.
• I have also made PDFs. They look very nice. I am tentatively pleased. I will have to check out the Issuu thing, which seems like an excellent way for people to share their PDFs online.

I still need to do the covers, and then run through the book checking the text and layout details.

I am ready to be done.

Ok, since the number of folks that have finished their sofobomo books has started to grow, I have finally gotten off my duff and taken steps to actually get a sofobomo.org website up and running.

I know that lots of folks wanted a discussion forum, I know that people have all sorts of ideas of what sort of nifty stuff could be hosted on such a website. For various reasons I’ve not wanted to have this first SoFoBoMo become quite so managed. To a large extent I didn’t want to make it too polished, because I wanted to see how many people were attracted by the underlying concept rather than attracted by the fact that it appeared to be a mass movement that would swiftly become some sort of world government. In other words, I have an innate distrust of things that are highly organized.

In any case, Bernie Sumption has agreed to both build the initial website and host it. Lots of other people offered to help, and I want to thank everyone who offered, but it seems to me that if we had more than one person doing it, I’d end up managing something, and since I’m not getting paid (and don’t want to get paid, thanks) better to do it with one person.

When the website is up and running, you’ll be able to use a form to submit the details about your completed book. The submissions will be moderated to prevent vandalism and abuse, but once a moderator approves your submission it will go with all the other approved submissions on a page where people can go and gaze in awe. As you can imagine, there are details to be worked out, here, so don’t be surprised if this changes some before we get it all going.

Also on the site will be the ‘official’ rules, Gordon McGregor’s excellent essay on why folks might want to participate, the list of people who signed up saying they would give it a shot, etc.

So here’s the reason for this post: the web site will be based on this template. I’d like you to click on that link and gaze in mute wonder for a moment. Notice that at the top, there’s an image that runs across the page. That image is 760 pixels by 200 pixels. Notice that the leftmost 320 pixels of the image are covered up by that blurry bit and some text.

So what we need is an image to go there. I’m hoping some motivated photographer has (or will make) some stunning image that expresses the very best of what SoFoBoMo means to the world, in a space that’s 760×200 pixels with the leftmost 320 pixels obscured. I’m hoping that person will give sofobomo.org the limited rights to use that image on the website, in exchange for nothing at all except the thrill of having his/her image up there for the world to see.

To the extent that such an endeavor can have rules, they are:

1. Nothing offensive, please. You know what I mean. Be nice.
2. No bending the rules on size and shape and where that 320 pixel block goes.
3. If more than one image is submitted, I will pick the final image from the pool. My decision will be final and there will be no whining allowed. Who knows, we may use more than one of the submissions. I don’t know yet.
4. You submit an image for consideration by posting a comment on this post that includes a link to the image.
5. You must hold all the rights to the image you submit. If the image is a montage, you must have secured permission from the owners of all the images used.
6. More rules may be added if I find them necessary

Go to it.

More editing today, as I work on winnowing down the (roughly) 800 exposures down to the 35-40 I’m aiming to end up with. In my mind this has always been a smaller book, not so much expansive as much as more narrowly focused. So although there are threads running through those 800 exposures that look interesting (and might be things I explore in the future) for right now and for this book I’m cutting those out and just staying with one theme, which is the experience of exploring the landscape with the dog - just being there. All of the images I made which are of details I noticed while I was out with the dog (for example, a bunch of shallow DOF botanical images) have been cut out. All of the images of Kodak and Tucker playing together are cut. Some quite nice landscapes without the dog in are cut.

My process is completely different from what I’ve tried before. In the past I ranked the images and keyworded the images and viewed various cuts through the set using the filtering in Bridge, or I made prints and put them on the wall. 35-40 images is a lot to do on the wall, and I was not looking forward to a multi-day Bridge experience, so I’ve shamlessly stolen a page from Amy Sakurai and generated the jpgs I needed to plop into the book (the right resolution, etc.) and plopped them all into a folder. This was my starting set. I made three passes through the entire set of images, making sure I had reasonable first blush photoshop treatments of all of the promising images. I ended up with a folder with slightly fewer than 100 images in it.

Then I fired up Fotomagico - a slideshow program. In the past I was not a fan of slideshows, but some time back I fell in love with one done by Dave Beckerman, and when I got back from China I bought Fotomagico to do a slideshow presentation of all of the photos I took in China. I’m sure other slideshow apps would work just as well - iPhoto would probably work fine, for instance, as would various slideshow apps for Windows. But as it happens, I have Fotomagico, I know how to use it with some fluency, it’s what Amy used, so I just went ahead and fired it up, and pointed it the folder holding all the jpegs I generated in the first step above.

And then, I just selected all of them, and dragged them into a slideshow - kapow. Since then, I’ve run through that slideshow a bunch of times. I’ve made a bunch of passes looking for weak images, which I’ve just dragged out of the slideshow. If I change my mind, I can drag them back in, although I haven’t done that once. If I notice two similar images, I either put them next to one another, run through them, and pick the best one, or if I want to keep more than one, I spread them out so they’re not close together.

As the size of the set of images still in gets closer and closer to the size target I have in mind, I’ve been starting to fiddle with the sequence. I know that in a book, people just dip in at random. But a PDF book is more like a slide show - you can page forward and backward, but people usually don’t use it as random access they way they do with a book. So the sequencing is slowly coming together, too. Some images have been shuffled toward the start, some have been shuffled toward the end. If your book has some linear narrative, this would be a great way to proceed. Mine doesn’t, but it’s still a good way to go, I think.

It’s all very organic and not like the sort of linear/rational thought methods I’ve used before, and as a result the editing has been a bit more fun than I thought it would be. It’s not fun relative to, say, going for a walk with the dog and camera. But it’s more fun than, say, slamming my hand in the car door or getting serious dental work done.

I’ve settled in to the editing today. I haven’t had quite the level of trauma as that described here ( a whole slew of DNG files for the SoFoBoMo project got deleted. Permanently. Ouch) I did manage to have a photoshop action run amok and overwrite a bunch of .psd files (only about three). Fortunately I noticed the problem, stopped the action, and could easily restore everything from the backup. I have multiple levels of back (as I’ve described in the past) but this sort of thing still scares me. There’s an object lesson there, folks. Be careful! Make backups!

I’ve dropped a few photos into the InDesign skeleton and cranked out a pdf. That’s good. I have some idea of how I want to edit the photos down to a smaller set, and I think I have enough good images that I’m not in trouble there.

And now, I think I’ll try using FotoMagico to review the images, as I described in the last post. More on that later, I guess.

Kodak has been urging me to make sure I have eliminated the risk of not having enough photos by going out on several more walks, right away. Naturally, just as I transition from photographing to editing, the weather improves.

I woke up this morning to realize that I have only ten days, really, to get it all done. Ack. Looking at the schedule, the last few of those days are already filled up with stuff to do. Double ack.

So today has been spent on editing and tuning the images that make it past the first edit. In a little while, I’ll go and plop some images into the book skeleton I’ve got and crank out a PDF, just to convince myself that stuff hasn’t all broken while I’ve been busy with the camera.

I noticed, looking at the SoFoBoMo pipe that Gordon McGregor set up, that lots of people are wrapping up their photography phase and turning their attention to book layouts and such. I’ve been having a grand time following people’s projects as they go along. I’m particularly interested is reading as people start the editing and share the details of how they go about it.

And an example, I was fascinated by the process Amy Sakurai is using, using FotoMagico (which is slideshow software for the Mac) to work on image selection and sequencing. Cool. I may give this a try; it seems less resource intensive that printing up copies on the laserprinter and flipping through them.