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.

Like a lot of SoFoBoMo participants, I’ve been in a bit of a post effort letdown. To get out, I’ve been trying to pick up the camera every day without any plan in mind except to fool around, and I’ve been trying to get caught up on things like reading that I’d deferred while I was making the big push.

What I’d forgotten was that maybe some unrelated activities might help ‘fill the well’, as Julia Cameron put it in The Artist’s Way.

By good fortune, we had the perfect activity scheduled for yesterday - a chance to hear a reading of a new play by one of our very favorite playwrights. It’s a fabulous play, and it got a great reading by an all-star cast. I’m often both thrilled to be present at readings of new plays, and uneasy for fear that I’ll get in the way. By good fortune, this time we happened to run into a good friend as we were going to grab lunch near the theatre, and we got to have lunch with him - and he was reading a part that afternoon. And we got to meet the couple who had commissioned the play, which was delightful - it’s nice to meet anyone who’s willing to commission new work in the theatre.

Anyway, after that I can feel the beginnings of the itch to get going on things again. Things, that is, other than the big slog of getting through the swamp of Print on Demand.

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.

Over on Colin Jago’s excellent Photostream, this insightful and thought provoking post:

I’m not talking about the temptation to clone out the vehicles from the “idyllic” mountain view, or even the fact that there is very little landscape in the world whose appearance hasn’t been created by man (essentially none in Europe I would say). No, I started thinking about how many landscapes there are that are now managed to preserve a given look.

These specific examples are English and you’ll have to make up your own to suit your locality, but when sheep are put on downland not because of their agricultural value but because the grass needs to be cropped close to create the style of landscape that we associate with the downs, or when the National Trust maintains upland farms in order to keep the bracken at bay and the dry-stone walls maintained, what we are doing is retouching the landscape to present a perfect appearance on our current definition of perfection. The difference between lip gloss and spending money putting in hedges in a place where we expect there to be hedges is not great.

I’ve had my landscape photography described as ‘exploring the relationship between the unmanaged landscape and managed landscape’. It remains a conundrum to me that almost all of what urban America considers ‘pristine’ landscape is actually heavily managed.

Lip Gloss. Go read the whole thing.

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.

Two different posts on two different blogs caught my attention this morning:

On Frank Armstrong’s Pitchertakin’, I found this post particularly uplifting this morning. I can’t articulate why, but somehow the combination of that particular photograph and Frank’s writing about the new greens of spring and the mood of a drizzly day gave me a boost at the exact moment I really needed one.

And on Paul Lester’s blog, I found this post on Daily Practice to be interesting. I’m a fan of regular practice, not just because it keeps my photographic skill set sharp but also because it’s like meditation and seems to help me keep myself in that somewhat elusive happy equilibrium.

I’m not sure why it is, but it seems to be particularly helpful if, during my more or less daily practice, I try to tackle some problem or make some small advance on what I’ve done the previous day. Pondering on that this morning brought to mind an old, old John Hartford lyric from a song titled “Julia Belle Swain“:

Well, I come up the river the other night
darker than the inside of a cow
Ain’t nothin’ like a crooked old river
to straighten my head right out

Sometimes tackling problems is exactly what we don’t want to do, and the problem solving we’re forced to do just disrupts our lives. And sometimes we need small problems that are just at the right level of challenge, in which we can invest our attention, and solving those problems keeps us happy and stable. I don’t understand why that is, but you don’t need to understand why to put it to good use.

I’m still in the post-SoFoBoMo recovery, so I’m not quite up to speed yet.

Nevertheless, via Joe Reifer’s Ramblings about Photography, I found this very thought provoking post on Tony Fouhse’s tonyfoto/drool.

And here I must rant a bit about digital being “easy”. While it’s never really the machine that takes the photo (it’s the machines’ operator) digital makes it way more likely that just about anyone can come away with an image that’s, you know, properly exposed. Then don’t you just slap the file onto your computer screen and admire it for, like, 20 seconds before you hit NEXT, never really living with the image? But the way digital technology has made so much disposable, made the generation of photographs (and photographers) so easy (and so easy to delete, thereby erasing history) kind of bugs me.

Hmm. Sorry, I’m not buying any. I read/hear this complaint about ‘digital’ all the time, and to be honest, it always seems like complete bunkum to me.

Part of the problem is that I just don’t believe, even for a second, that we can really control how any eventual audience reacts to our work. We can control how WE react to the work, and that’s about it.

So when Fouse says “Then don’t you just slap the file onto your computer screen and admire it for, like, 20 seconds before you hit NEXT, never really living with the image”, he’s saying that for some bizarre reason, he can’t make himself do anything else. There’s nothing to prevent him leaving an image up on his screen for hours or days and interacting with it the way he’d interact with a print on the wall. There’s nothing to keep me from taking, say, a print of Ed Weston’s Pepper #30 and running it through a shredder, other than the fact that I like the print enough to hang it on the wall instead.

So all the argument about digital being ephemeral and ‘not real’ and ‘disposable’ is really more about our own attitudes, and not about the technology.

The part that really fails to stick for me is the idea that in order to make artmaking worthwhile, we must make the process hard. We must pay our dues, the reasoning goes, and we must make the process so difficult that we exclude the vast seething masses of wretched humanity from art-making. And I think that’s blowing smoke. I think it’s little more than some sort of guild behavior. If you’ve been reading here for long, you’ve probably come to realize that’s an attitude with which I vehemently disagree.

But interestingly, Fouhse continues:

Another reason why I’m planning on using the 4×5 is that it changes the ways you work. It slows things down. Each time I push the button it costs me 6 bucks (film and processing). Not that I’m gonna use that as an excuse to become (even more) anal. I’m just interested in using a different process, giving the old brain a workout.

I think it’s interesting because Fouhse seems to have done an abrupt turn, here. He’s gone from saying that if the work is done digitally, it’s too easy. Now he’s saying that doing it the hard way is useful to him because it slows him down and is more expensive, and imposing those constraints on himself is actually helpful and not a hindrance. In other words, he’s saying that using the 4×5 looks harder but is actually easier. In other words, he’s saying that imposing constraints on himself actually makes it simpler for him to get at making the art he wants to make.

One reason I find that interesting is that I’ve long suspected it was true for me, as well. SoFoBoMo is, if nothing else, an experiment in how imposing some seemingly pointless constraints (e.g. you must do everything in a one month period) would seem to make it harder to get a book done but actually makes it easier.