A few SoFoBoMo observations

On May 1, 2009 at 6:42am Pacific time, there were 588 people registered for this SoFoBoMo 2009. I just checked. Right now, there are 846 people registered. That means (to my surprise) that 30% of the people who have registered (so far) registered AFTER the start of the two month window. Interesting, eh?

That total of 846 registrants (so far) is almost exactly 5 times as many as last year. And to think that on April 1, I jokingly predicted that we might get three times as many registrants as before.

So far, there are 148 books uploaded to the website. I don’t think we’re going to get 5 times as many books as last year’s tally (which was 60). Beyond that I’m not insane enough to attempt to project how many books will be finished and uploaded.

Some observations:

1. As I predicted, a lot of the people who planned on using Booksmart (the software you get for free from Blurb.com) discovered, to their horror, that Booksmart watermarks proofs that you print, thus making it really really hard to generate a clean PDF to upload for SoFoBoMo. Some of them have just gone ahead and uploaded that watermarked PDF, which I think is fine even though it’s perhaps stretching things a bit. Some of them have discovered this problem, and just given up, which I think is disappointing. But the whole business points out the value to working out the details of your workflow in advance of starting your month.

2. So far I’ve seen books assembled with Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, Microsoft Publisher, Adobe InDesign, the free Scribus, Photoshop – and that’s just the toolsets I know about.

3. The 15MB limit on PDF size for upload caused some consternation as people came up against that limit. Some thinking will have to be done for next year about better ways to handle that.

4. Reading the blog stream, I have been struck by a) how many people thought it was easy, and b) how many people found it too hard. There’s a definite skill set to getting a book done.

5. I observe that some people who finished last year and registered this year have not finished books this year. Despite the ’skill set’ observation above, doing a book remains hard. If things do not click, it can be really hard.

6. There are people who have participated twice now, and who have announced already that they will participate next time around.

Got thoughts or observations on this stuff? Comments welcome…

PDF to Blurb

Sure, in the past you could load your PDF into Photoshop, crank out jpgs for each page, and then load those jpgs full bleed onto pages in Booksmart, and get a book printed on Blurb that way. I’ve done it – I did it with my SoFoBoMo book last year. It works. I had trouble with loading the jpgs, and had to drag the individual page images into Booksmart one by one, and my hands hurt for two days.

But this looks more interesting. I haven’t even read everything, but it claims to be a way to generate your PDF, and then pass it directly off to Blurb for printing.

I’ll be trying it. If you try it, let me know how it works.

Too Much

With the photos of the Paramount Theatre and Jones Playhouse, I discovered, rather to my surprise, that I had LOTS of photos to include in my SoFoBoMo book. Too many photos, in fact. In order to cut the book down to some reasonable size that I’d have a hope of getting under the 15MB limit, I’d have to cut an awful lot of photos.

That’s ok. I whacked the book in half – and now I have TWO sofobomo books. I did this, and I was feeling pretty chuffed. The stuff from the first two theatres I’d photographed had been edited down pretty heavily, and at around 22-25 photos each, the book was just about the right size. I tweaked some text, rubbed the corners with a rag moistened with spit to shine it up a bit, and called it done. Whew – one book finished. The pressure was off.

This morning, I sat down to edit the second book, aka Part II. I’m scrolling through page after page of photos, and it suddenly occurs to me that I still have way too many photos. There I was, editing out photos I really liked, because I was again aiming for 20-25 photos of each theater. Now that’s an arbitrary goal, and I can change the goal as I please, but as a first cut I wanted to aim at that for a host of reasons, some of which I’d have trouble articulating. My son once commented that “Editing something you’ve written is hard, because every time you cut a sentence, it feels like you’re killing your own children.” That’s pretty close to how I felt.

I can see the book getting better, but it sure hurts to cut some of those photos. It’s not that they don’t belong, it’s that I finally have a sense of where I want the book to go, and these fine photos are not pushing that direction. It’s a weird feeling.

Ghost Light

I’m certain that your theatre images would capture me and make me forget time; the pictures I have seen here have that power. Like the one in this post makes me thinking what’s going on. What is it and who put it there, and so on. I love it!

The subject of the photo in that post (and the photo in this one) is a ‘ghost light’ – a light that’s left on stage when a theatre is “dark” (that is, not currently being used). There are a slew of explanations of why ghost lights are left on 24/7, ranging from pedestrian (having the stage lighted, even if just by the one light, prevents accidents if someone happens to blunder onstage in the dark) to superstitious (the light is there to keep ghosts from taking up residence, or ghosts from performing plays, or the characters from past performances from returning to life on the stage, etc.) Most ghost lights are like this one – spartan and functional. This one was set upstage center, but it’s probably more traditional to set them further downstage, especially for proscenium theaters where there’s a drop off the edge of the stage.

One of the things Bill and I found in our adventures photographing in empty theatres is that the presence of the ghost light has a big impact on the feel of the space. Only one of the theatres we’ve photographed didn’t have a ghost light set when we photographed it (the first one, it turns out). Our plans are to rephotograph that particular theatre, and I expect when we do that we’ll ask them to leave the ghost light onstage.

Book Decisions

So, after adding a whole bunch of photos from yesterday’s session at the Jones Playhouse, I now have something like 117 pages in my SoFoBoMo book. That’s a wee bit long.

So I face a choice:

• edit things down way more tightly, making a smaller book
• Edit things down a bit more tightly, and make more than one book

I am leaning toward the latter.

And I can remember when people were discussing whether 35 images was too high as a minimum for a project done in a month.

Completed Book List

Just to let folks know, when you upload your SoFoBoMo book PDF to sofobomo.org, and go to check the “completed book page”, your book will likely not appear at the bottom of the page. The books are listed in the order participants registered, so your book will fall somewhere in the middle.

SoFoBoMo status

I’m busily charging batteries and formatting CF cards to get ready for this afternoon’s session photographing the Floyd and Delores Jones Playhouse at the University of Washington. This will be the last session that goes into the SoFoBoMo book, but the project stretches into the indefinite future – I’m having a lot of fun.

Using InDesign Free Trial

I’m using Adobe InDesign CS3 for my SoFoBoMo book effort. It does the job, although I find it complicated and the UI is somehow contrived so that whenever I work for an extended period of time, I end up with my hands painful and stiff from repetitive motions.

But it has excellent PDF generation capabilties – I have 100+ images in my book (I’m editting it down, yes) right now, and I can crank out a PDF that’s under 15MB with no trouble at all.

And, if you’re still pondering how you’re going to generate the PDF layout for your book, and you’re not averse to learning to use InDesign, Gordon McGregor points out that there’s a free 30 trial version. That’s how he did his book.

Toning

Rod asks

Paul, I agree with your comments here. But what prompted me to post a note here was to ask you about the images you’ve been showing here lately of the theaters. They all have this really attractive tone/color to them: Is that a soft sepia tone?

All the B&W images that I tone are toned using the curves tool in Photoshop.

A fairly lengthy article on this technique can be found at http://www.butzi.net/articles/toning.htm.

The article includes a link to a .zip file containing the curves files used for all the examples there. The theatre images were all toned using the “slightly warm mid-tones, neutral highlights” curve.

My Personal SoFoBoMo status

Unlike last year, where I documented pretty much exposure I made for SoFoBoMo, this year I’ve been working away industriously on my own without saying much about it.

Here’s where I am…

I have the book layout mostly done, in InDesign. Much of my books layout is simply lifted from my effort last year. Unlike last year, where I put a lot of thought into the layout, this year I’m mostly interested in generating a book in time for the end of SoFoBoMo, without losing the momentum I have built up for the project overall. I like this empty theatre project, and I see it going on for a long time – much longer than the one month effort for SoFoBoMo.

So I have the book layout done (mostly), and I have a bunch of photos laid in the book, in four sections – one section each for the four theatres I’ve photographed so far. I’ve got roughly 100 photos in the book now. That’s way more than I want for the final book, so I’m busily working on editing that number down.

To top it off, I have another session at yet another theatre scheduled for Monday afternoon. That will give me one more section, and a slew of photographs to add.

Finally, I have a lot of text to write. This is not good news, because the writing part is going very slowly. So far I have written quite a lot, and then throw all but a very small fraction.

I started this whole project on May 18th. I still have plenty of time, but I’m planning on being finished with the book (but not the project) on 14th.