For once, I’m actually making progress on my static website update.

That’s partly because, in the update, a great deal of what’s out there now is going to disappear. All of the equipment reviews, for instance, are obsolete, annoyingly out of date, and frankly more appropriate fodder for blog posts now that I have a blog. I understand that some of it might be of historical interest. Sorry, the work of bringing it up to date and reformatting it is too large to make it worth going through.

The articles, too, will mostly go away. Most of them, though, were essentially blog posts but made before I had a blog. I may take that content and recycle it as blog posts. But the articles will vanish from the website. In some cases I’ll leave tombstone html files that will redirect searchers to the blog entry, I guess, to avoid breaking links.

The other big change is that all of the photographs will go away. I’ve looked at flash galleries, and they are horrid. I’ve looked at javascript galleries, and they’re horrid. I’ve looked at what feels like 27 million different kinds of galleries, and the bottom line is that all of them are horrid. Oh, they’re easy to add photos to, so they’re probably easy to maintain. But the actual user experience of viewing photos with them is horrid.

And it turns out that my long slow move away from single images or even collections of single images continues unabated, so web galleries that are just random easily maintained sets of images are boring to me. I’m interested in collections of images. Maybe sequences of images. I want to share larger copies of the final versions of these collections of images.

And SoFoBoMo convinces me that PDF’s are a good way to do this, so PDF portfolios are what is going to be on the static website. I’ve gone through the work that’s currently on the old site, and I’ve re-edited it (think: butzi.net remastered!) and put it into PDF portfolios.

So the static website will be:

• the obligatory splash page, very plain with just one image
• a page about how to contact me
• a page offering information about me and my photography
• a page for the PDF portfolios
• a page with info and links for buying books, when I have books available (e.g. Blurb versions of SoFoBoMo books, and Blurb (or equivalent) versions of the PDF portfolios.

The result will be a much, much smaller static site. There won’t be much there, which will improve the chances that I’ll update it more often. The good news is that this change will give me an easy way to distinguish photos I post on the blog (which are NOT always what I’d consider winners but are sometimes losers I find interesting for some reason) and the work on the static website (which will be ‘finished’ work, as it were).

Once I get that done, I’ll tackle the blog, I guess.

Colin Jago sent me the link to this video of Henry Wessel discussing his artistic process.

The part that rang my bell was this:

So the mind’s always in there saying “Ah. Look at that. You know… Telephone pole. Macadam. This, move right, move left. So you wind up making maybe five pictures, six pictures of the same stuff. The first ones, you can see how different they are than the ones when your mind got in there.

When your mind gets in there they start to look like photographs that you already know. They look like problems that you’ve already solved. They’re never taking you to a place that’s unfamiliar. They’re taking you to what you’re supposed to do.

Then they look like everybody else’s photographs.

This is where I’m at. I’m trying to make photographs without a rationalized checklist (cameras settings? check. Focus? check. Major elements of composition arranged artfully? check. Distracting elements of composition minimized? Check. Edges ok? check. Lighting perfect? check.) and instead just let myself do it. I’m aiming for look, look, look, see, raise camera to eye, let shutter go. Part of what I’m trying is minimizing the time between when I see something to photograph and the moment when the shutter goes ‘kathwap’.

Every second I delay is another second of opportunity for my rational mind to get in there and say “That’s crap. Look at that clutter. Keep that branch away from the edge. Jeebus, your’e screwing it up. Hold the camera level. This is going to be boring. You’re stupid. This is all stupid. You’re photographing the wrong stuff.”

Of the photos I’ve made in the last month, the ones I still like after looking at them over and over are by and large the ones where I saw something, lifted the camera, and let the shutter go without hesitation. They’re often the ones where afterward I was left standing, camera in hand, thinking “What the heck? What was that?”

I have learned one trick – when my brain says “photograph that”, I just photograph it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a photograph I’ve already made – I just go ahead and make it again. Making it again is the fast way to get past it. So I walk past that same tree for the 500th time, and I see the same photograph for the 400th time, and I don’t bother with thinking “No, Paul, you’ve *already* made that photograph” and the resulting struggle, instead I just give in to the impulse and make it. See, lift camera, shutter. The cost for the exposure is near zero. Just make the photo, put it behind you, move on to the next photo.

If you walk past the same tree every day for the next year, and you make the same photo 365 times, it’s not 1 new photo and 364 mistakes. It’s a series of photos that perhaps leads you to a new place. And would be part of what I’m looking for.

Twenty years ago on this day, my good friend Rob and I sat outside with his shortwave radio, and listened to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I know there are folks for whom a farm gate is an exotic thing. For me, this gate is everyday. I walk from my house to this gate at least twice a day, every day, rain or shine. The dog and camera go with me on these walks, and although we walk the same path, twice a day, we’re discovering new things, every time. When you see something for the first time, you get the big impression. When you look at it every day, you come to see the subtle changes from day to day – not just how it looks after a rain, but the difference between how it looks after a hard rain and how it looks after a gentle shower.

Today, the drops of water hanging from the top of the gate caught my eye. So my question for the day is this: would I have noticed this if I hadn’t taken the camera on the walk? I’m guessing I wouldn’t. It’s not that a person can’t; I’m sure it’s possible. But for me, the camera is a big help.

That’s why I take the camera.

So, last week I bought a Wacom Bamboo Fun Pen and Touch tablet. It’s advertised as supporting both a pen, and a multitouch trackpad.

My hand stiffness problems, along with some RMS issues when I’m working long sessions on the Mac Pro, had me considering this unit. The multitouch trackpad, if it works, would be a real boon. So I was pretty excited when it arrived, but put off installing it until today, because I was pretty sure today would have a long stretch of uninterrupted time.

My big disappointment – the install disk does not run. At first, I figured this was because I have the security settings for Flash cranked way tight. I fiddled with that, and got no joy. The install program just throws a blank white window on the screen. I downloaded what looks to be the right driver, and installed it, and I can use the tablet and adjust the settings fine.

Then I tried the disk in another mac. Same story. Bad words.

So I can’t get to the manual, which is apparently on the disk. So there are all sorts of fancy settings, and there’s this ring that apparently fits on the pen and I don’t know what it does, and I’m just sure that watching the videos that are supposed to be on the installation disk would make all this clear. But when I go to the Wacom website, although they have videos for all the OTHER tablets they sell, they don’t have the videos for THE NEW TABLETS. Talk about an epic fail.

So I guess I will wait until Monday, when their customer service phones are open, and I will call them and ask what the deal is.

Or maybe I’ll just send email to Amazon, get a return number, and return the damn thing. What a big waste. For this price, you’d think the install disk would work.

Paul’s initial rating of the Wacom tablet – worthless piece of crud with no support on their webset, which makes it worse than a worthless piece of crud, it’s a time wasting, frustrating, worthless piece of crud. No, actually, it’s an EXPENSIVE time wasting frustrating worthless piece of crud.