Musings on Photography

I’ve gotten little done this afternoon. I got sidetracked trying to figure out why my laptop (recently upgraded to OS X 10.5 ‘Leopard’) didn’t see my z3100.

After considerable fiddling about with network hubs, replacement network hubs, etc. it finally occurred to me to see if my desktop machine could see the printer. Ah, that’s actually hard to tell. Fiddling about with the HP apps to control the printer led to every attempt to launch the various apps resulting in the same app (Printer Utility) launching. Hmm.

So I went to the printer, and thought “I’ll just see if the PRINTER thinks it can see the network. And it said it was trying to get a DHCP address. Hmm.

Power printer down. Power printer back up. It launches into it’s power up calisthenics, complete with checking the filesystem for the disk in the printer. Hmm. Not normal. Apparently my printer crashed.

It takes a surprisingly long time for a z3100 to boot, especially if it has to run fsck on the filesystem.

As God is my witness, I am not a luddite. I have steadfastly advocated for improved technology in the world of photography. But when I can’t make progress on photography because my damn printer had a seizure, and it takes half an hour for it to power off and power back up, it makes me want to say really rude words.

Loudly.

It’s been raining, raining, raining. And although I’ve picked up the camera (or tried to) most days since I’ve finished my SoFoBoMo book, it was all dreck and it all felt forced. I kept telling myself, over and over, “The only way out is through.” But it has been sounding a little hollow this past week.

And then, this morning, I picked up the camera and Kodak and I wandered down to where our driveway crosses the stream, just to take a photo of how much water is in the stream - just documentation. The rain had pretty much come to a temporary halt, and the sky was solid overcast, and it wasn’t very bright out.

On the way down the driveway, Kodak got distracted by the smells left behind by something, either the bears or the deer he chased last night. I got distracted by the plants along the way. Everything was wet and glossy, and the sky was a huge softbox, and it all looked mighty fresh and nice, so I started taking photos.

It took a long time to go the 150 feet or so to the stream. It took a pretty long time to come back, too. But it sure felt good.

It’s sometimes hard to remember that it just feels good to be out with the camera in my hands. I’m grateful I was reminded today.

A while back, Starbucks was promoting the movie Akelah and the Bee. At the time they were handing out little cardboard cards with various unusual words, like the one in the photo above. (side note: I didn’t find most of the words all that unusual.) Anyway, one day the word of the day at the local Starbucks was ‘elucubrate’, which I liked so much that I brought the card home and taped it to the cabinet above the spot where the tea kettle lives, in the hopes that having it there would prompt me to get more done by working harder and longer. It worked for a little while, and then the card faded into the background and I forgot all about it.

But a couple of days ago, I noticed that my photo output had dropped off considerably. About the same time, the card caught my attention again.

I just need to get out more with the camera - work harder and longer. I need to elucubrate.

But there are so many distractions. Here are a few more:

Matt Alofs, whose photography I greatly admire, has a very much worth reading post on his blog, about whether we actually WANT photography to be considered art.

Paul Lester has a post on daily practice. It’s an older post, but it touches fairly directly on my current situation.

Gordon McGregor has a wake up call, touching on a host of issues like talent, style, intuition, high energy particle physics, and intergalactic ballistics. Ok, not those last two. I’m having trouble writing a cogent description of Gordon’s post, and it’s short, so you should just go read it.

Over on seeing… thinking… photographing…, a post about the gap between the art we want to make and the art we end up making instead.

Somehow there’s a thread running through all that. It has something to do with not worrying about what the outcome is, but instead focusing on the positive benefits of the process.

And on that note, I will now step away from the computer, pick up the camera, and take the dog for a walk.

A friend of mine once claimed that there are are two kinds of thinking and that most people pretty much only use one. One kind of thinking he called ‘grinding’ - where you work toward the goal in very small increments, step by step. The other kind he called ‘leaping’ - where progress is made in big intuitive leaps, and then you go back and fill in the details. I am, for whatever it’s worth, a leaper. I work on a problem by working on something else, and some part of my brain works things out, and then all of a sudden I get the entire picture in one great flash. I’ve absolutely no ability to figure out how I’ve gotten from one point to another; introspection of the process just isn’t possible. I have to go back and fill the blank by grinding toward the intuitive solution.

And now I can hear everyone thinking “Yes, Paul, that’s all very nice and perhaps even vaguely interesting, but what the heck does it have to do with photography?” The answer is that, if you happen to be a leaper, and you happen to be a photographer, you might find that blogging is a good way to fill in the gaps. It’s even a pretty good way of provoking a leap.

I don’t know what it is about writing things down, but it’s an act of enormous impact for me. There’s something about the act of trying to get an idea into words and then get all the words to stand up straight and mean only one thing that helps me sort things out in my own head. It’s often the case that I sit down to write about something on this blog, and just as I start to get to the end, I realize that I’ve changed my mind, and I go back and rewrite it all over. Writing orders and clarifies.

I have no idea if that’s true for everyone. But it’s yet another reason that, validation aside, blogging about photography might be something you want to try.

[side note: if you want to know if you're a grinder or a leaper, or you want to know what it's like to be a leaper, go to Amazon.com for this book, and use the 'search inside' feature to search for 'sailboat', and click on the link for page 142. Read that chapter; it's only three pages. If, when you read that, you understand exactly the experience of the protagonist, you're most definitely a leaper.]

Joe Reifer wrote an interesting post on his blog recently, well worth reading. Joe covers a lot of ground in there, ranging from how bad TV is (and comparing writing on the web unfavorably to TV), blogging to make money, selling stuff, and blogging to get validation.

There’s a lot of stuff Joe’s written in there that I disagree with pretty strongly. But I still think it’s an excellent read, because I think he brings up a good set of questions - why blog about photography? Why read blogs about photography? What is the blogger getting out of it, and what are the readers getting out of it?

If there’s something I agree with in Joe’s post, it’s the overall “Shut up and play yer guitar” flavor of it. There’s blogging about photography, and reading blogs about photography - and then there’s actually picking up the camera and making photographs.

If we might pick one line to summarize Joe’s argument, I’d pick this one:

Did you think a bunch of bored office workers pontificating about what lens to buy was going to help your photography?

And, I have to agree with this. I know that dpreview.com is out there, along with a bunch of equipment obsessive blogs that gush enthusiastically about the frame rate of the new Canon DSLR, or whatever. But here’s an astonishing thing I’ve discovered - unless I specifically direct my browser to go there, I never see it. Likewise the bloggers whose writing is meritricious blather - I don’t have to read it.

And so while I agree that Sturgeon’s Law (”99% of everything is crap”) applies to the internet in spades, one of the amazing things is that by and large you aren’t forced to deal with the dross just to get to the pure metal. If you want to obsess about the viewfinder relief or the shutter button release pressure of the latest crop of digital camera, go ahead. What you read is up to you. But there are more kinds of photography blogs than the equipment obsessed variety.

There are, for instance, blogs that obsess about the output of whatever artist has hit it big, or whatever artist is about to hit it big, or whatever. There are a slew of these - most of them full of deep, insightful writing about a bunch of stuff that I frankly find boring. But that’s ok. My browser and RSS reader don’t show me those blogs, because unless I follow an enticing link, I never feel a need to direct them to. Those blogs have a big following. Clearly the readers are getting something, and the writers are getting something as well. And that’s fine.

What I tend to follow are the blogs that are about some artist (usually a photographer, but not always) describing their day to day experience. Most are written by people who aren’t professional writers, but I don’t care. I’m not looking for great writing, I’m looking for sharing. For whatever reason, I’m interested in blogs that cover the day to day trials and successes of Actually Making Art. I’m interested in blogs written by people who are willing to share their disappointments and struggles, their confusions and emerging understanding right along with their successes and stuff they’ve finally figured out.

So here’s one part of Joe’s post that just doesn’t ring true for me:

What many of us are really selling is artistic validation. If a photograph falls in the woods, and there’s nobody there to see it, does it make a sound? The answer to the great zen koan of why we make websites and blogs and post photos online is simply that we want people to say that they like our photos. This isn’t a great revelation, but I feel like nobody wants to say it out loud. Getting a pat on the back for something you created feels good. The Internet gives us a way to get that pat on the back. Some of us need it more than others.

This doesn’t ring true for me, despite the fact that I agree that a lot of folks are putting up websites because they’re trying to get validation. Validation isn’t the only reason for writing a blog, and although it’s probably true that most bloggers are at least in part motivated by validation, it’s also true that a lot of blogging gets done out of nothing more than a desire to participate in sharing.

I enjoyed SoFoBoMo. I enjoyed making the photos, and I enjoyed putting together the book. I enjoyed getting the validation of a few people sending me positive comments about the book. I am still enjoying the sense of having accomplished something.

But a great deal of what I’ve enjoyed, honestly, is both reading the blogs of some of the participants, watching them struggle with the same issues and doubts, and seeing so many of us actually crank out a book. That sharing is continuing, it seems, as a bunch of us struggle through the thicket of issues with actually getting a book printed via POD. I was tremendously encouraged when I read (on Colin Jago’s Photostream):

No, no, not that sort of podcast. But POD-cast. There is a lot of it about because all these people have all these nearly books. The great thing is that this concentrated rush of POD-ing means that a lot of really useful information is getting shared. We are all standing on our own shoulders.

Maybe it’s just the mood I’m in, but I think this sharing aspect is key.

I went through and did an accurate count of the number of people who signed up on the signup thread. My count was 170 people.

As of this writing, there are 48 finished books on the project page at http://www.sofobomo.org/projects.html. I know of at least one more book that is finished but isn’t yet listed. I’m betting there’s one more out there, lurking, which will push it over the 50 book mark. That works out to roughly 30% of the people who signed up finished a book, which I think is just amazing.

I know of at least two people who have done more than one book and thus get a free print from me. One person (Bob Wong) did three books, which I guess earns two prints.

To say that all this exceeds the expectations I had when I wrote the signup post is massive understatement. I thought that, with luck, we’d get a total of 12 people signed up, and if we got three finished books, that would be pretty amazing.

UPDATE: fifty-two books fifty five books fifty six books

I’ve been more quiet this week because I’ve been going through and doing an overhaul of my static website. I’m not done (heck, I’m not even halfway through). But going over that material has driven home some interesting points.

I’m surprised at how embarrassingly dated some of the material is. A review of an Olympus C2000z, the first digital camera I bought, is essentially of zero interest now. Articles on putting together a website - hopelessly out of date. An article on doing theatre photography using film - wow, that’s out of date.

So clearly a lot of stuff will get left behind as I make the transition from doing the website with Microsoft Frontpage to just hand coding the pages (using Coda on the mac, for those who care).

At the same time, other stuff is getting ripped out. The begging for contributions - part of a sort of experiment to see how easy it was to monetize website traffic - that’ll all go. Quite a lot of stuff is staying but being substantially cut back. In the end my plan is for the static website to be quite a lot smaller than it is now.

And the photos - it’s way past time to update the galleries again.

Going through all this stuff has made me keenly aware of how much better a blog is for certain kinds of content. One thing that’s nice about a blog is that every single entry is dated. I’d give a lot to know exactly when I wrote some of the stuff that’s on my static website.

There are problems with blogs - for example, most blogs don’t do a lot to make it easy to find the backlog of content. But I think that with a bit of effort those problems can be fixed.

At the same time, I’ve become even more aware of things that a static website can do well that can’t be done well with blog posts. Galleries of photos are an obvious example.

In her “I’ve finished” post, Sarah Ketelaars writes:

As i used Blurb to make my book i’ve had to make a word version (the Blurb pdf has a watermark) so i’ve made a version as close as possible in word and now just need to get it on the site. How do you make a link to a pdf? the images are on my website but not as a pdf. Sorry i feel like i’m always asking questions but i can’t work out how you link to the pdf.

Ok. This is a not uncommon problem for folks. You’ve got the PDF. You want to put it somewhere you can link to, so that you can share it with other people (and hopefully list it at sofobomo.org).

You have two basic options:

1. You can put it up on the web in some place you control. If you’ve got a web site, put the PDF on your website and then just link to it there. That’s what I did.
2. You can upload it to a web site that makes available. A lot of folks have used issuu.com. I did that too. It’s not hard, so don’t be afraid to give it a try.

In the future we’ll have some PDF file hosting arrangement for SoFoBoMo that will make this simpler. But for now, that’s the solution.

This morning, being reminded by both Colin Jago at photostream and Mike Johnston at TOP, I headed off to Amazon to order up a copy of the Steidl version of Robert Frank’s The Americans. While there, I noticed that ALL of the recommendations that Mike had made in his post were listed in the “people who bought this also bought these” doogus that Amazon gives you.

And, because I was operating at 6am with very little sleep, this struck me as somewhat funny, so I fired off an email to Mike, telling him of his great influence. Almost right away I got a thoughtful reply from Mike, who expressed concern that there were no equivalent books to the ones he’d recommended being done today. Now, I will be the first to admit that I’m not a big photo book collector and that I’m not up to date on who’s currently producing work that is as iconoclastic as Mikes recommendations (’iconoclastic’ is the word Mike used). The ubiquitous ‘they’ could be cranking out such books by the super-tanker load and I could believe I was simply unaware of that fact.

In any case, I think that what’s happening is that the world of photo books is on the cusp of a big upheaval. The easy availability of POD publishing, the rapidity of improvement in the quality of reproduction in POD, and the easier availability of the software and the skills to do book layout are going to be the game changers in the photo book world.

Let me draw an analogy to the music world. Before, there were the record label companies. They controlled physical distribution and had the connections to do promotion, and if you were a musician, they pretty much had a lock on whether you could get your music recorded and distributed. And then along came the internet, and personal computers, and iPods, and all of a sudden the record labels have been left standing there wondering what hit them. They thought they were in the business of selling round pieces of plastic with holes in the middle, and someone came along and pulled the rug out from under them.

And now we have musicians like Jonathon Coulton (see http://www.jonathancoulton.com/), who looks like he’s built his own musical career, doing the distribution over the internet, and cutting the record label out of the deal. And he’s not the only one. In a world where anyone with a personal computer and some relatively inexpensive equipment can record their own album, and anyone who can put up a web site can distribute said music, the game is quite a bit different. There are a lot more musicians out there doing a lot more music. I think in the end that’s a good thing.

In the same way, SoFoBoMo demonstrates that it’s perfectly possible for people to put together their own books. Lots of SoFoBoMo participants are taking their finished PDF books to the next level and getting them printed through POD. I’m hoping to add some of those books to my book collection.

So I’m hoping for a renaissance in the photo book world, and it won’t come from the usual photo book publishers. Oh, I think that the super high quality publishing houses that currently do photo books will come out just fine, because they occupy a niche in the book market that will be hard to penetrate through POD for a while yet. But the edgy, iconoclastic stuff that Mike Johnston misses, as well as the quieter stuff that can’t get the attention of the publishers - that stuff is going to get done, but not by mainstream presses. It’ll get done by the photographers themselves. I think that in the end, thats a good thing, too.

Herewith the obligatory Shakespeare, relevant to the discussion:

Full fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

Photographer Steven Durbin has started a new blog, Along Sourdough Trail, in which he says he’s going to track his newly reactivated Sourdough Trail project. There are only a few posts there so far, but from what I see it looks like it will be highly interesting.

In his post announcing all this over on Art and Perception, Durbin writes:

But my main question is whether you know of good examples of blogs devoted to specific projects. I enjoy reading quite a few blogs–must post on that sometime–but none have such a degree of focus. One can, in principle, achieve a similar effect by creating a blog category for the project and choosing to view only posts in that category, but that still doesn’t allow the freedom of a separate design for the project. True, such personal project blogs may often be password restricted or unlinked to, so there might be many I’d be interested in if I knew of them.

So if you know of other blogs focussed on a single project like this, you might want to leave a comment on that post, or send email to Steve.